Born 1947 making me a little over 72 now and was a son of an Army Officer which meant he moved around as a child it was always by train which created his life-long passion. His family did settled in Ringwood and grew up there.
After high school, he went to Monash Uni to study science but lost interest quickly and hitched around the country for a while until returning to Melbourne. Called up for National Service at 19 and eventually responded at 21. Became known as 3794220.
Commissioned through the Officer Training Unit and was allocated to the Signal Corps.
John met Lorna on a train in the early 60s and they were married in 1970. He became a communications engineer through RMIT and stayed in the Army for 30 years and retired as a LTCOL in 1998.
In the meantime he had a parallel existence as a volunteer at the Puffing Billy Railway. He started volunteering at the age of 14 some 57 years ago - what a record!
About 35 years ago, he was appointed as Civil Engineering Manager at Puffing Billy, a voluntary position, which I somehow fitted around my Army career for about 9 years, until it became just too much of a challenge to do both.
One of his jobs as Manager at Puffing Billy was to work with Vicroads to get the Belgrave-Gembrook Road under the timber bridge at Selby lowered by about 1.5m to improve the headroom for road vehicles. This was after a concrete truck hit the bridge and broke 3 of the 4 timber beams supporting the bridge span over the Emerald bound lane.
It cost a lot of money and when they started thinking about returning the Railway to Gembrook (its original terminus) with four timber bridges to be replaced it became obvious that bridges were going to be our biggest challenge.
To find out how much of a challenge, he got our bridge contractor to give us an estimate of how much the big bridge in Wrights Forest would cost to build and he came up with a figure of $750,000, a huge sum in the late 1980s.
We started fund raising to re-build the Railway from Lakeside to Gembrook and went to the state government to ask for help by funding the big bridge, which was going to be the show-stopper if we couldn’t get it re-built. Government offered us $500,000 towards the bridge and asked us if we would be able to find the rest.
The first (and practice) bridge was just near Wright Road in Avonsleigh. It is 83 ft (25.3m) high and 25 ft (7.6m) tall and took us about 10 weekends to build. We picked up a lot of useful skills, many of them being the sort of skills the ancients would have used to build the original Puffing Billy bridges in the 1890s.
Then came the big event, the big bridge in Wrights Forest. This bridge is pretty big, being about 203ft (61.9m) long and 50 ft (15.3m) high and is complicated by being on a sharp curve. To build that using weekend volunteers would have taken years, so we put a number of our trained volunteers on the payroll, including Doug, our PTC ‘teacher’ who took long service leave to help us.The bridge took us 5 months to build and cost $344,000, so we used the rest of the $500,000 grant to build track over the bridge and to make a start on the last of the bridges.
The last bridge to re-build was across Cockatoo Creek in Cockatoo and this bridge 153 ft (46.6m) long and 25 ft (7.6m) tall. It consists of 11 timber piers with steel beams between them and all sitting on concrete foundations. Standing the bridge up took no time at all and after a couple of weekends we had a bridge ready to lay track over. The prefabrication of the timber piers and erection of the bridge took us only 11 days – John and his team were pretty good at it by then!
A couple of weeks later we joined the track progressing from Lakeside to the track progressing from Gembrook, then hopped on a train and went to the pub at Gembrook, the first train from Belgrave to Gembrook in 45 years.
South Gippsland Railway had a bridge in need of some major repair and they asked, could we help? This was the start of Puffing Billy’s External Projects department, which was Johnand anyone I could persuade to help.
Our first few jobs included:
- A major bridge repair on the South Gippsland Railway at Korumburra
- Construction of a 4.3km long tramway at Portland
- Reconstruction of a huge timber bridge over the Curdies River at Timboon
All at the time when John was President!!
John loves the work he does but spending so much time away from Lorna is a very big challenge.
Some of his many jobs include:
- Management of the reconstruction of six bridges (totalling 69 spans) and 8km of railway track on the Castlemaine to Maldon railway (Victorian Goldfields Railway);
- Management and practical supervision of 18km of railway track and bridge maintenance (totalling 96 spans) on the Victorian Goldfields Railway for 15 years;
- Management of the reconstruction of five timber bridges (totalling 23 spans) on the South Gippsland Railway;
- Management of construction of a 4km standard gauge tramway track at Portland, Victoria.
- Management of the restoration of a timber footbridge over Williamstown station, Victoria.
- Management and supervision of personnel undertaking the restoration of six timber bridges and 24km of railway on the Hotham Valley Railway (WA).
- Management of the restoration of a 30 span timber railway bridge near Timboon, Victoria.
- Management of reconstruction of 5km of track on the Central Highlands Tourist Railway (Daylesford).
- Management of construction of a new 10 span timber trestle bridge at Rubicon in NE Victoria.
- Management of re-construction of five timber trestle bridges (totalling 21 spans) on the closed Wodonga-Cudgewa branch line in NE Victoria as part of the High Country Rail Trail.
I am now retired but I still seem to have plenty to do. I am the volunteer Civil Manager for the Victorian Goldfields Railway and I spend about three days a week on that railway, plus a bit of time as a volunteer at Puffing Billy. Really all that seems to have happened is that no-one pays me for this work anymore.
Beech Creek Bridge near Rubicon being stood up
Winters Flat Bridge near Castlemaine being re-built
Working on Curdies River Bridge near Timboon
Great Community Raffle Night
Ticket selling for the 2019 GCR concludes on 31st July.
Our club meeting for Tuesday 27th August will be at the presentation night for the prizes at Ferntree Gully Nissan, 1000 Burwood Highway, Ferntree Gully. Snacks and drinks are provided by the dealership from 6pm.
Community groups that have taken part this year, also need to sign off on the amounts due for their fundraising.
Attendance numbers for our club are needed, please let me know by Tuesday 20th August. This is a great opportunity for Rotary to meet and hear from community groups.
Lorna
RETICULATION PROJECT
PP PHF Russell Marnock passed on to the Editor information about the Reticulation Project the club supported during his Presidential year. This details are listed in the News section of our website as this may be of broader interest - please click
HERE to view.
New Email Signature Emblem
For those who use an email signature, we have one for this year thanks to Ken's contacts in PR and Marketing - this one is official and correct :)
