Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip, from a silent black-and-white home movie from the mid to late 1930s, shows a new FP rail bus being driven along railway tracks from a body works factory in Granville in Sydney. The first scene shows men standing beside the rail bus with factory buildings in the background. In the next sequence, filmed from an elevated position, the rail bus is coming towards the camera and then going past it. The camera continues to track the rail bus as it travels into the distance.

Educational value points

• This clip shows rare footage of the 1930s FP rail buses, petrol-powered rail motors that came into service in 1937 in a failed attempt to provide passenger services on little-used country branch lines around Harden and Cowra in south-western New South Wales. The rail bus featured in the clip is the FP 3, the second of four new rail buses (FP 2-5) built at the same time, to a design developed by the NSW Department of Railways.

• Rail buses were small rail motors (self-propelled rail cars) intended for use on the most marginal branch lines. Larger rail motors were first developed in NSW as a result of a 1924 Royal Commission that found that locomotive-hauled passenger train services on country lines were quite inadequate. Unlike the rail motors, the FP rail buses proved to be uneconomic. By 1942 they had all been withdrawn from passenger service and converted to railway pay vans.

• The rail buses were produced by Waddington Body Works, a company that operated from Camperdown, Clyde and Granville in Sydney producing both buses and trains. Waddingtons began in 1921 as Smith and Waddington, a small firm building customised bodies for motor car and small bus chassis. After the Great Depression the firm started up again as Waddington Body Works and diversified into railway rolling stock.

• Unlike FP 5, which came to a spectacular end when it was dynamited off the tracks in 1941 in a payroll robbery attempt, FP 3 had a typically uneventful life, first as a passenger rail bus around Cowra and then Harden and from 1940 as a pay van. Until 1969 it zipped along a regular route carrying clerks who paid railway employees alongside the tracks and at the workshops, stations and depots where they worked. In 1969 FP 3 was written off and in 1970 it was scrapped.

• Travelling as one of 18 passengers in the FP 2-5 rail buses must have been a fairly unpleasant experience as they shared the space with the Ford V8 petrol engine. Passengers sat in fixed bus-type seating, some longitudinal and some transverse. Measuring 6.91 m long x 2.34 m wide x 2.69 m tall, the rail bus was not air-conditioned. The driver sat at controls at either end of the passenger space depending on which way the rail bus was going.

• Home movies such as this one are invaluable as historical documents, offering a record of working lives, artefacts and traditions of the past – in this case, a little-known form of rail transport and a view of an industrial landscape in Sydney at the time. Here, the amateur filmmaker, David Waddington, was probably recording some of the new design of FP rail buses coming off the production line.