Inside The Newport Workshops: The Rise and Fall of Australia's Greatest Locomotive Empire

Añadido: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]If you have ever caught a train in Melbourne, the wheels under your carriage were turned on a lad at Newport Railway Workshops on Champion Road, Williamstown North, 130 acres.

[00:00:13]33 mi of internal track.

[00:00:17]5,000 workers at peak, more than a third of them women.

[00:00:21]The same brick and iron compound that built the Spirit of Progress, Australia's first all steel airconditioned express train.

[00:00:30]The same compound that built Heavy Harry, the largest nonarticulated steam locomotive ever assembled in Australia.

[00:00:38]The same compound that built the rear fuselages of the Bristol Bowford bombers in 1942.

[00:00:45]Today, that wheel lathe is contracted to a French multinational headquartered 8,000 mi away in St. Om, Paris. How did the largest railway workshop in the southern hemisphere become a tenant on the land it built? This is the story of how an empire built with public money was sold for parts.

[00:01:05]Chapter 1, the Yorkshire Engineer. To understand what was signed away on the 15th of January, 2000, you have to go back 116 years to a Yorkshire stepping off a steamship at Railway Pier, Williamstown. Richard Spite, born Selby, Yorkshire, the 2nd of December 1838, son of a head cler in the Midland Railway Goods Department, a man who died suddenly in 1850 and left his widow to raise the family on her own. Methodist upbringing.

[00:01:37]Spate was brought up from boyhood in the service of the same railway company his father had served. By 1877, he had risen to assistant general manager of the Midland Railway Company. at the time the premier railway in Britain. His salary in Derby was £1,500 a year. In November 1883, the colony of Victoria came calling. Robert Murray Smith, the Victorian agent general in London, had been told to find the best railway administrator in the British Empire and pay whatever it took. The cabinet in Spring Street picked Spite from a short list of four names. The offer was £3,000, double his Midland salary. He took it.

[00:02:22]He arrived in Melbourne on RMS Lucatania on the 10th of February 1884.

[00:02:29]With him were his wife Sarah, his mother, five sons, and five daughters.

[00:02:34]He was 45 years old. Within months, he was chairman of the new three-man railway commission, overshadowing his fellow commissioners, AJ and R. Ford, neither of whom had any practical experience in railway administration.

[00:02:49]His political masters in Spring Street then passed the Railway Construction Act 1884. The law history would remember as the Octopus Act, 59 new lines authorized in a single statute. Every parliamentary electorate would get its own branch line. Spite's job was to build the rolling stock to run on all of them. He ordered the consolidation of every Victorian railways workshop function.

[00:03:14]Williamstown, North Melbourne, Spencer Street onto a single 32 acre paddic between the Jalong line and the Williamstown line at Newport. He hired engineers Breitton and Lewis to design it. He capitalized it with what would today be the equivalent of more than $30 million. But here is the thing about Spite. The land boom that justified his appointment collapsed under him. 29 Melbourne banks suspended trading in the crash of 1891 and 1892.

[00:03:45]Property prices in Melbourne fell by 60%. The new premier, William Shields, needed a sacrificial victim. In March 1892, Spite was suspended. He sued David Sim of the age for liel, £25,000 in damages. The case ran for 80 days through late 1893.

[00:04:08]The jury found in his favor. They awarded him one farthing, a quarter of a penny, the smallest coin in the realm.

[00:04:15]He returned to England, broken, in 1894.

[00:04:19]He died in Perth in 1901, age 62, while serving as a member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. But the workshops he had ordered, designed, and capitalized, those would in 1937 build the most famous train Australia ever ran.

[00:04:39]Chapter 2. The 32 acre paddic.

[00:04:43]The men who designed Newport are largely forgotten. Their work is not.

[00:04:49]Engineers Breitton and Lewis drew up the master plan in 1885.

[00:04:54]They worked from the British railway workshop template crew swindon and Doncaster adapted for Australian timber Australian climate and the broad 5'3 in gauge the Victorian colony had faithfully chosen in 1858. Construction began in 1886.

[00:05:13]The first stage was complete by 1888.

[00:05:16]The central block, three stories of red brick, fronted by an Italian clock tower with a cast iron clock face and a terra cotta tiled roof. The east block, erecting shop, machine shop, fitters shop. The West Block boiler shop, foundry, paint shop, a 200,000galon water tower, a bushmill for cutting Gibsland iron bark and red gum into sleepers and carriage frames, a separate tarpolan shed in the northern section of the site for the men who sewed goods wagon covers, 32 acres at the start, approximately 170,000 m, linked to the main running lines by its own private branch.

[00:05:58]The first locomotive constructed in-house at Newport went into service on the 30th of June 1893.

[00:06:06]A Z-class outside cylinder 060 side tank engine, road number 526.

[00:06:14]The workers called her Polly. She was the first of 536 locomotives that would be built on this site over the next 66 years. Polly herself survived in continuous Victorian railway service until June 1978, 85 years on the payroll.

[00:06:33]Today, she sits in the museum's Victoria collection.

[00:06:37]But the timing of her first run was catastrophic. The land boom that had funded the Octopus Act collapsed in 1891 and 1892.

[00:06:47]The Victorian colonial treasury hemorrhaged. Construction on dozens of the Octopus Act branch lines was halted.

[00:06:55]29 Melbourne banks suspended trading between 1891 and 1893.

[00:07:02]By the time Polly steamed out of Newport in June 1893, the colony was effectively bankrupt and Spite himself had already been suspended. Newport was now a public liability, a vast brick and iron campus with a workforce, a payroll, and falling traffic. Here is what is genuinely remarkable. The workshops kept building through the 1890s depression, through Federation in 19001, through the First World War, through the influenza pandemic of 1919.

[00:07:37]The site grew steadily through every crisis. By 1920, the original 32 acres had expanded to about 70. carriage shops, truck shops, the laboratory, the ambulance ward, the school of instruction for apprentices.

[00:07:54]The Everly workshops in Sydney had been the larger Australian railway employer in the 1880s. By the late 1920s, Newport had matched them. Heritage Victoria, seven decades later, would record the 1888 buildings as one of the best surviving 19th century railway workshops in the world. The site Breitton and Lewis had drawn on paper in 1885 had become by 1920 the largest single industrial complex in the colony of Victoria. And in April 1920, the Victorian railways got the man who would build the most famous train Australia ever ran.

[00:08:37]Chapter 3.

[00:08:39]The Cathedral of Cutting Oil. Walk through the gates on Champion Road in 1948. The Hall Street level crossing rings. It is 3:30 in the afternoon.

[00:08:50]Shift change.

[00:08:52]2,700 men and women pour across the rails. You smell it before you see it.

[00:08:57]Cutting oil, hot steel, coal smoke from the foundry cupillas, linseed and tarpentine from the paint shop, wet canvas from the tarpolan shed, the thick sweet bite of a working factory in full song.

[00:09:12]Inside the west block, a Victorian railways worker named John Monk would decades later give the most complete description of the place ever recorded.

[00:09:22]His words appear in Eddie Butler Bowden's 1991 history. In the service, that book became the standard work on the Victorian railways workforce and it is the source quoted by the old treasury building's official exhibition on Newport. Newport in Monk's recollection was vast. He named the trades one by one. Carriage shops building passenger stock. Truck shops building goods wagons. A bushmill cutting whole logs into carriage timber. A sawmill with a bending area where steam treated timber was curved to fit the roofs of the day.

[00:09:58]A paint shop where every coat of paint used on Victorian rolling stock was mil and mixed on site. An erection shop where steam locomotives were assembled.

[00:10:09]A boiler shop where every Newport boiler was riveted by hand. A foundry casting brake blocks, signal equipment, luggage racks, and a thousand other components.

[00:10:21]A tarpolan shop with rows of heavy industrial sewing machines where covers were sewn for open goods trucks. A laboratory where chemists tested every product the workshops used. A bolt shop where the famous dog spikes for holding steel rails to wooden sleepers were forged. a blacksmith's and spring shop with steamdriven stamping hammers that shook the ground. The 1948 Census of Trades read like a glossery of the industrial revolution. Engineers, pattern makers, upholsterers, painters, coppermiths, blacksmiths, research chemists, trained nurses, carpenters, plumbers, spring makers, clarks, typists, laborers.

[00:11:08]over 60 separate occupational categories on the payroll at the same time. The ambulance ward was no token. A trained nurse had been on duty since the early 1920s, treating an average of 65 men per day, burns from the foundry paws, crushed fingers in the press shop, eye injuries from the blacksmith's hammers.

[00:11:30]This was hazardous work performed at industrial scale. The dog spike was Newport. Every steel rail on every wooden sleeper across the top across the Victorian network was held by a Newport forged spike. The bolt shop alone produced millions every year.

[00:11:49]Every signal, every brake block, every locomotive headlamp on the network had passed through this site. And in the 1920s, the game of Trugo was invented at Newport by workers on their lunch hour.

[00:12:02]A Victorian railways game played by no one else in Australia, still played in Newport in 2026 in honor of its inventors.

[00:12:12]And on the 15th of September 1920, the man who would lift this workshop into legend had landed in Melbourne. Chapter 4. Clap and the gold key.

[00:12:24]His name was Harold Winthrop Clap, born St Kilda, Melbourne, the 7th of May 1875. Son of Francis Borman Clap, the American who had built the Melbourne cable tram network. Educated at Brighton Grammar. By 1901, he had immigrated to America to learn the rail trade from the men who had built it best. He worked at General Electric in Skenctadi, New York.

[00:12:49]He oversaw the electrification of the West Jersey and Seashore division for the Pennsylvania Railroad. By 1920, he was vice president of the Southern Pacific Railroad of California. In April 1920, on the recommendation of former commissioner Sir Thomas Tate, Premier Harry Lawson offered him the chairmanship of the Victorian Railways Commissioners, £5,000 a year, the highest public servant salary in the Commonwealth of Australia. He took it.

[00:13:19]He arrived in Melbourne on the 15th of September 1920. What Clap brought from California was speed. Suburban electrification begun in 1919 was completed across Melbourne by 1922.

[00:13:33]The largest suburban electrification project in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. A new generation of locomotive designs followed. The A2class 460, of which 185 were built. The S-Class 462 Pacific S300 to S3003 built at Newport between 1928 and 1930 with the largest steam locomotive boilers ever cast in the Southern Hemisphere.

[00:14:02]But Clap's masterpiece, the train every Australian over the age of 80 still remembers, was the Spirit of Progress, Spencer Street Station, the 17th of November, 1937.

[00:14:15]Premier Albert Dunston stands at the door of the parlor car. He turns a special gold key. The doors open.

[00:14:23]All steel construction. Air conditioning throughout. Reading lamps at every seat.

[00:14:29]A dining car serving a four course meal at full speed.

[00:14:34]A streamlined S-Class Pacific at the head in royal blue and gold. The locomotive S3002 Edward Henti named for the Victorian pioneer with smoke deflectors angled like the prow of a destroyer. 300 invited guests boarded for the inaugural run. Robert Mincy's the federal attorney general and former railways minister soon to be prime minister was among them. So was AO Henti descendant of Edward Henty himself. Clap introduced the premiere. He called the construction of the train a great achievement built entirely by Australian workmen at the Newport workshops. The press the next morning reported the launch in tones reserved for royal visits. On the demonstration run between Wereabby and Lavton, the train touched 79 12 mph, a new Australian broad gauge speed record. The locomotive was racing an Airco DH4 airplane overhead for the newsre cameras. The carriages had been built at Newport by tradesmen drawn from more than 60 separate occupations.

[00:15:42]Core 10 weathering steel sides.

[00:15:45]Queensland brown beach wood paneling.

[00:15:48]Chrome fittings. Gold leaf class lettering applied by hand to read first, second, dining car, parlor car.

[00:15:57]For clap, this was the peak. For the Newport workforce, it was the beginning of the most demanding decade in their history. And on the 3rd of September 1939, an Australian institution was about to be conscripted. Chapter 5. The boy farm goes to war. On the 30th of June 1939, Harold Clap left Victorian Railways. The Commonwealth government had decided to build the Bristol Bayer torpedo bomber in Australia and they wanted Clap to run the program. He was made general manager of the aircraft construction branch. The following March, he was made chairman of the new aircraft production commission. In January 1941, he was kned. By June 1940, the German army had crushed France. The British had evacuated from Dunkirk. On the 11th of June 1940, Prime Minister Robert Menses appointed Essington Lewis, managing director of BHP as director general of munitions. The Buffett program was decentralized by design.

[00:17:04]Front fuselages were built at Cholora in New South Wales. Main planes were built at Islington in South Australia. Rear fuselages, tail assemblies, ailerons, and elevators were all built at Newport.

[00:17:18]Final assembly took place at General Motors Holden, Fisherman's Bend, and at the Department of Aircraft Production Hangers. At Mascot, hundreds of buffets rolled out of Australian factories between 1941 and 1944.

[00:17:33]Newport built the back end of nearly everyone. It did not stop there. The Victorian Railways own wartime record listed Newport's output, Brenun carriers, and tugboat hulls. finder screws and surgical instruments, patterns for diesel engines, components for gun howitzers, shells, torpedo parts, narrow gauge 3'6 in rolling stock for the North Australia Railway running from Darwin to Bert Doom and the locomotives kept coming. On the 7th of February 1941, H220 Heavy Harry entered service. It was a 484 3-cylinder express locomotive weighing 260 tons. It was the largest nonarticulated steam locomotive ever built in Australia and the largest nonarticulated steam locomotive ever to run on Australian railways. It is the only three-cylinder 484 still in existence anywhere in the world. It was designed and constructed entirely at Newport. Every casting was poured on site. H221 and H222, sister engines with frames laid in 1939, were never finished. The steel was diverted to the war. Their components were scrapped. The workforce peaked at approximately 5,000. Of those, around 35% were women. Roughly, 1750.

[00:19:06]The Newport Railway Workshops Preservation Group records this as probably the highest proportion at any time at Newport. The workshops worked around the clock with day and night shifts throughout the war. John Monk, who served on a wartime shift, said it plainly years later. The women on his shift were never named in the Argus.

[00:19:28]They were named on the time clocks.

[00:19:31]They were named on the payroll cards now sitting in cardboard boxes at the public record office Victoria Depot in North Melbourne. VPR Series 12563.

[00:19:44]The Newport Employee Record Cards 1948 to 1971 not yet digitized in 2026.

[00:19:53]They earned roughly 2/3 of the male hourly rate for the same work. Their work built the bomber fuselages that flew over the Bismar Sea, the Coral Sea, and the New Guinea campaign. When the men came back from the Pacific in 1945, the women were sent home from Newport with a thank you and a final pay packet.

[00:20:14]After 1945, the workforce went home expecting a reward. The reward was already being eroded by Glasgow.

[00:20:24]Chapter 6. The Glasgow betrayal.

[00:20:28]The postwar locomotive Australia loved most was designed at Newport. It was built 8,000 mi away. In September 1949, the Country Party Premier John Macdonald awarded the contract for the new RClass 464 Hudson passenger locomotive. The RClass had been designed by the Newport Drawing Office with sweeping smoke deflectors, semi-streamlined boiler casing, and the most beautiful steam locomotive ever drawn in this country.

[00:20:56]The original Operation Phoenix postwar reconstruction plan was for 20 Rclass units to be built at Newport. That contract went instead to North British Locomotive Company at Hyde Park Works, Glasgow. 50 locomotives. In January 1950, Macdonald raised the order to 70.

[00:21:15]Newport's 20 unit build was cancelled outright. A 100 ton gantry was shipped from Glasgow to Nelson Pier Williamstown to unload the engines from blue funnel line freighters R701 to R770.

[00:21:31]Glasgow steel under Australian smoke deflectors. 70 locomotives, 6,000 tons of British steel, all of it freighted across the Indian Ocean because a country party premiier had decided the work was cheaper if it was done somewhere else.

[00:21:49]R704 was painted in a one-off livery of black, gold, and red with stainless steel boiler banding and sent to the 1951 Festival of Britain in London.

[00:22:02]She now sits in the Newport Railway Museum, still in her festival livery, R707, City of Melbourne, runs in steam most Saturday mornings under the operation of 707 operations. the volunteer group based in the west block. Glasgow built Newport designed. Crowds of children still photograph her at Williamstown.

[00:22:26]The two locomotives that bracket the end of construction at Newport sit quietly in the official record. N432, the last steam locomotive ever built at Newport, rolled out in 1951.

[00:22:38]M232, the last locomotive of any type built at Newport, rolled out in 1959.

[00:22:46]That was the end.

[00:22:48]66 years from Poly to M232, 536 locomotives in continuous construction.

[00:22:57]In 1958, Premier Henry Bolte made it formal. Future Victorian diesel locomotives would be imported and assembled by Clyde Engineering at Granville in New South Wales.

[00:23:11]Newport would build no more mainline motive power. The political wound that would kill the workshops was already being prepared. The trade decisions of 1949 and 1950 taken by a country party government in the name of speed and price broke the workshop's claim on the future of Australian rail. The dog spikes kept coming. The carriages kept coming. The repair work kept coming. But the centerpiece had been outsourced. And 8,000 m is a long way to bring a locomotive back when the seller decides not to build one for you anymore.

[00:23:49]Chapter 7. The Cane Windown.

[00:23:53]The Windown took three decades. In 1962, the Australian Railway Historical Society Victorian Division opened the Newport Railway Museum just south of the workshops with H220 Heavy Harry as its star exhibit. In 1981, Steam Rail Victoria, the volunteer preservation group founded in 1965, was granted formal tenure in the West Block. In 1983, the John Kaine Junior Labor Government's Transport Act dissolved Victorian Railways outright. The 100-year-old statutory authority was broken into three. Veline for country trains and freight, the MET for the Melbourne suburban network, and the State Transport Authority for overall coordination.

[00:24:41]In August 1983, Veline's new orange and gray livery was unveiled at Spencer Street. The workforce numbers tell the rest of the story. 5,000 at peak, 2,700 in 1948. By the late 1980s, under 500.

[00:24:59]By 1990, about 300. A factory that had carried entire migrant suburbs on its payroll was in two generations reduced to the size of a single midsized engineering firm. In 1985, the new Veline Nclass diesel locomotives were not built at Newport. They were built at Clyde Engineering Summerton plant north of Melbourne. The bogeies came from Bradken. Newport's role on the order was zero. A workshop that had built every locomotive on the Victorian network for 66 years could not get a contract for the bogeies on its own state's diesel fleet. The bolt shop fell silent. The tarpolan shop closed. The Bushmill was dismantled. The train nurse left. Joan Kerner, the member for Williamstown and the first woman ever to serve as premier of Victoria, established a working party in 1990.

[00:25:56]The recommendation was to reserve the west block as a heritage rail precinct.

[00:26:02]Save the buildings. Save the machinery.

[00:26:04]Save what could be saved. In 1994, the Newport Railway workshops were added to the Victorian Heritage Register under reference H1000.

[00:26:16]The Heritage Council citation called the 1888 buildings one of the best surviving 19th century railway workshops in the world and one of Australia's most outstanding items of industrial heritage.

[00:26:30]In 1997, the National Trust classified the site as B4019 of prime national importance.

[00:26:39]Kerner saved the buildings. She could not save the work. By 1991, the Cain Kerner Labor government was in financial crisis.

[00:26:49]The State Bank of Victoria had collapsed. The Pyramid Building Society had collapsed. Premier Ka resigned in August 1990. Kerner inherited the wreckage and held office for 18 months.

[00:27:04]On the 3rd of October 1992, the Liberal opposition led by Jeffrey Gibb Kennet went to the polls. Kennet won by one of the largest swings in Victorian electoral history. His treasurer was a Melbourne barristister named Alan Stockdale.

[00:27:22]The workshop that had built the spirit of progress had less than a decade to live as a public asset. Chapter 8.

[00:27:30]Kennet Stockdale and the 15minute door.

[00:27:34]State debt. The day Kennet took office approximately 30 billion Australian dollars. Stockdale announced a privatization agenda within weeks.

[00:27:44]Electricity, gas, banking, ports, public transport, everything. In 1996, the Kennet government legislated retrospective alterations to the rail and tram workers superanuation arrangements. The union struck at the 1997 Australian Grand Prix weekend with the international press watching. The strike was broken. The superanuation changes stood. The public transport corporation, the body that had owned Newport Workshop since the 1st of July 1989, was disagregated in stages.

[00:28:23]Veline was split into Veline passenger and Veline freight. The MET was split into Bayside trains, hillside trains, Swanston trams and Yarat trams, six new corporate entities, each designed to be a sailable parcel.

[00:28:39]On the 29th of August 1999, the franchise awards were announced. The largest single privatization transaction in Victorian state history. Six contracts, five operators, 116 years of public ownership signed away in a single day.

[00:28:57]Vline passenger sold to National Express, the UK listed bus and rail operator headquartered in Birmingham, England with a parent group market capitalization at the time of around 1.5 billion pounds sterling. Veline freight sold to Freight Victoria Limited which would be renamed Freight Australia in March 2000. Bayside Trains and Swanston tram sold to National Express, rebranded as MTRA and MTRAM. In October 2000, Hillside Trains sold to ConX, a subsidiary of the French Violia Transport Group headquartered in Paris.

[00:29:36]Yaratram sold to a French-led consortium with Transdev and the construction firm Transfield. The contracts contained patronage forecasts that the University of Melbourne transport academic Paul me would later describe as uneiv unachievable on any reading of the underlying data. National Express had committed to grow Bayside patronage by 84%.

[00:30:03]ConX had committed to 67% on hillside.

[00:30:07]Swanson Tramas had committed to 40% growth in tram boardings. And here is the kicker. On the 15th of January 2000, ownership of the Newport Workshops themselves was transferred from the public transport corporation to Clyde Engineering. The very company that had been awarded the Granville Diesel contracts back in 1958. After 116 years as a Victorian public asset, the workshops were now private property.

[00:30:36]5,000 workers had built the Spirit of Progress on this land in 1937.

[00:30:41]Their grandchildren now worked there as tenants. The clock tower still ticked.

[00:30:46]The shift siren no longer sounded. And on the 16th of December, 2002, the British operator walked out.

[00:30:54]Chapter 9. The 400 million walkout. It took 38 months. The 1999 privatization began to unravel in early 2002 when all three franchises, National Express, ConX, and Yara Tramas threatened to withdraw from Melbourne, citing their inability to grow patronage to match the forecasts in their own contracts. In February 2002, Transport Minister Peter Bachelor granted the franchises an additional 105 million Australian dollars in subsidies for that year alone.

[00:31:29]It was not enough. On the 16th of December 2002, National Express announced its withdrawal from Victoria.

[00:31:37]The British company simultaneously handed back Veline passenger, Mtrain, and Mtramm 2 days before Christmas.

[00:31:46]National Express disclosed a write-off of close to $400 million Australian dollars on its Australian operations.

[00:31:54]The total cost to Victorian taxpayers is disputed. The Public Transport Users Association estimated that when all subsidies are counted in full, the privatization cost the state more than $2 billion more than its forecast treasury savings by 2010.

[00:32:14]Some narrower estimates put the direct cost to the state at closer to $400 million in immediate transition expenses.

[00:32:22]other accounts working from the combined cost of forfeited bonds, transition payments, and the 17-month emergency operation by state-owned successor bodies, place the total higher again.

[00:32:35]The exact figure has never been officially reconciled by any state government, Liberal or Labor. What is confirmed is what happened next. Vline passenger M train and M tram all reverted to the state of Victoria.

[00:32:54]The BRA Labor government in office since October 1999 inherited the wreckage. In February 2004 came the second privatization.

[00:33:06]ConX took over the entire Melbourne suburban rail network from the 18th of April 2004.

[00:33:13]Yarat trams took over all trams the same day. The contracts contained renewed subsidy provisions amounting to billions of dollars in additional state payments over the years that followed on top of the original Kennet franchise subsidies.

[00:33:28]Read that again. The privatization that was sold to the public as a saving cost the state on the most cited estimate billions of dollars more than it had been forecast to cost.

[00:33:41]Meanwhile, the freight side moved in parallel. In February 2002, Pacific National was incorporated. It was a joint venture between Toll Holdings and Patrick Corporation.

[00:33:55]On the 16th of August 2004, the Victorian treasurer announced Freight Australia would be transferred to Pacific National. The press release was titled Rail Set to Grow with Freight Australia Transfer Agreed.

[00:34:11]Newport's contract work followed the corporate cascade.

[00:34:16]A Gonan and Company, the Newcastle engineering firm founded in 1899, was sold in August 1999 to United Group Limited.

[00:34:28]UGL acquired Olst Transport Australia in 2005.

[00:34:35]UGL was itself acquired in December 2016 by CIC Group, the Australian construction giant majority owned by German Hawktf in turn majority owned by Spanish group AIS.

[00:34:51]The freight rail running on Victorian tracks in 2026 is owned by Black Rockck New York. The workshop wheel lathe is run by Paris.

[00:35:01]Chapter 10 €3.6 6 million in St. UE.

[00:35:06]In 2012, Altom re-entered the Newport site under its own banner. Between 2018 and 2024, the Evolution Rail Consortium, which comprised Downer EDI, the Chinese state-owned manufacturer CRC Chang Chun, and the Australian investment firm Plarai, assembled the high-capacity Metro trains for the Melbourne suburban network inside the Newport Boiler Shop.

[00:35:34]The contract value was approximately $2.3 billion Australian dollars.

[00:35:40]On the 2nd of April 2024, the 70th and final high-capacity metro train set 70 departed Newport for the Packenham East depot.

[00:35:52]In May 2024, downer rail vacated the eastern section. Veline resumed tenency.

[00:36:00]The broad gauge underfloor wheel lathe, one of only three of its kind in the state of Victoria, was contracted out to Alistum.

[00:36:10]The man who signed the alestum side of those contracts was Ori Pupat Lafage born the 10th of April 1969.

[00:36:19]Akol poly techchnique class of 1988. AOL national deon a show a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Olam in 1998. He was chief financial officer from 2004 to 2010. He became president of Olst Transport in 2011. He was chairman and chief executive officer from February 2016.

[00:36:49]Olam's headquarters is at 48 Ru Alba Dalene St. Wen Il de France. That is 8,000 mi from Champion Road.

[00:37:01]Total revenue for the financial year ended. The 31st of March 2025 was €18.5 billion.

[00:37:11]The order backlog at the same date was 95 billion.

[00:37:16]The group employs more than 80,000 people in 63 countries.

[00:37:22]In January 2021, Olm completed its 4.4 4 billion euro acquisition of Bombardier Transportation, making it the largest rail equipment maker on Earth outside China. Pupat LFA's remuneration as filed with the French Markets Authority was 950,000.

[00:37:45]His cumulative pension rights as at the end of December 2025 were €3,636,252.

[00:37:56]The Austin board on his announcement that he would not seek a further term waved the service condition on his 2023, 2024, and 2025 long-term performance share plans. On the 1st of October 2024, BlackRock completed its $3 billion acquisition of Global Infrastructure Partners, the owner of Pacific National.

[00:38:21]The new owner of Australia's largest freight rail operator now manages roughly 11.5 trillion from 50 Hudson Yards Manhattan. On the 1st of April 2026, Pupat Lafage stood down as Olst chief executive officer. He was succeeded by Martin Sion, formerly chief executive of Aran Group, the French German aerospace consortium that builds the Ariani rockets.

[00:38:50]Walk down Champion Road today.

[00:38:53]The 1888 clock tower is still ticking.

[00:38:57]The wheel lathe 20 meters from R707's tender is contracted to Paris. Chapter 11. What 5,000 workers built. It is a Saturday morning in March 2026. I am standing on Champion Road, Williamstown North. The 1888 Italian 8 clock tower is above me.

[00:39:19]Three stories of red brick, a cast iron clock face, a terra cotta tiled roof.

[00:39:26]Volunteers from the Hobson's Bay menshed are restoring it scaffold by scaffold.

[00:39:31]The site behind it covers 130 acres.

[00:39:34]Heritage listed under Victorian Heritage Register reference H1000.

[00:39:40]The east block houses Victra and Veline's Broadgage Depot. The West Block houses Steam Rail Victoria 707 operations and the Diesel Electric Rail Motor Preservation Association. All volunteerrun surviving on Saturday morning excursion tickets.

[00:40:00]707 The City of Melbourne, Glasgow.

[00:40:04]Built Newport designed steams out under the clock tower this morning. The wheel lathe 20 m from her tender is contracted to Olam Paris. The Newport Railway Museum, a short walk south, holds H2220 Heavy Harry under the protective roof installed in October 2020. The Hall Street level crossing where 5,000 workers once spilled across the rails at shift change is now a pedestrian underpass. Lesson one, build it yourself or someone else will own it.

[00:40:39]In November 1937, the Spirit of Progress was built entirely at Newport by Australian workmen on Australian wages.

[00:40:48]C10 weathering steel sides, Queensland, brown beach, wood paneling, more than 60 separate trades represented in the construction. Clap said it himself at Spencer Street. The train had been produced entirely by Australian workmen at the Newport Workshops. In April 2024, the 70th and final high-capacity metro train was completed at the same Newport site.

[00:41:15]Chinese components from CRC Changun Australian Assembly by Downer EDI.

[00:41:23]The capability did not vanish in a single moment.

[00:41:28]It vanished contract by contract between 1949 when the Rclass order went to Glasgow and 2024.

[00:41:38]75 years.

[00:41:40]Newport stopped building locomotives in 1959.

[00:41:44]It became a final assembler, then a tenant, then a wheel lathe contract operated under license to Paris.

[00:41:53]Lesson two. Privatization is a one-way door. On the 29th of August 1999, the Kennet government sold Veline passenger to National Express. On the 16th of December 2002, National Express walked out 2 days before Christmas. By 2010, the Braxbrum Labor governments had paid billions of dollars in additional subsidies to the second round operators.

[00:42:20]The exact total cost remains disputed.

[00:42:24]The ownership of the Newport workshops themselves transferred from the public transport corporation to Clyde Engineering on the 15th of January 2000.

[00:42:34]They never came back. The Country Party government of 1950 sent the Rclass contract to Glasgow. The Liberal government of 1999 sent the freight system to Britain and the trams to France. Different parties, different decades, the same door. You walk through it once.

[00:42:55]Lesson three, patriotic debt is real. In 1942, 5,000 workers at Newport, more than a third of them women, built Bristol Buffett bomber rear fuselages, tail assemblies, ailerons, and elevators. The women came onto the shop floor for the first time in 1940. Their names sit in cardboard boxes at the public record office Victoria depot in North Melbourne and the VPR 12563 series, not yet digitized. By 2026, the company that operates the surviving wheel l on the site of their wartime work is headquartered 8,000 mi away in St. Owen, Paris.

[00:43:40]Its retiring chief executive walks away with €3.6 €6 million in cumulative pension entitlements and three years of waved condition share plans. The patriotic debt of 1942 has not been repaid. It has been forgotten. The names of the women who built the bomber fuselages have never been read out at any official ceremony. They have not been put online. They sit in cardboard in a warehouse in North Melbourne waiting for someone to open the box. The 1888 clock tower on Champion Road is still ticking.

[00:44:17]R707 still steams out of the West Block on Saturday mornings. The 130 acres are still heritage listed. The trades boiler maker, fitter and turner, blacksmith, pattern maker, sail maker are not taught at Newport anymore. The 5,000 workers of 1942 are gone.

[00:44:39]The women whose names were never in the Argus are gone. John Monk is gone.

[00:44:46]The clock tower on Champion Road has watched all of them come and go. Made strong. Made to last. Made at Newport.

[00:44:55]The clock tower survives. The workforce does not.