Rail enthusiasts and the general public alike were thrilled with the appearance of a passenger train on the branch line north of Dimboola for the first time in a quarter of a century.

Operator Seymour Railway Heritage Centre operated a special passenger train to the Wimmera in conjunction with Murtoa’s Big Weekend, and while they were here, took the opportunity to travel the branch lines that rarely see anything other than grain trains.

The train departed Seymour on Friday morning, travelled via Southern Cross Station in Melbourne, and arrived in Horsham mid-afternoon, hauled by locomotives C501 and X31, both resplendent in the original Victorian Railway’s blue and gold. The C class spent the weekend stabled at Horsham while the X class ran solo on the branch line legs of the journey.

Saturday saw patrons travel back to Murtoa, where the opportunity was given for them to de-train and spend the day enjoying the Big Weekend or remain on the train for the trip north to Beulah, where a long table lunch was available. The train then returned to Horsham by early evening, collecting passengers at Murtoa on the way.

On Sunday morning, a crowd gathered on the platform at the Dimboola railway station to join the train to experience branch line train travel for the first time or to relive an experience from the past.

In contrast to the inclement weather the previous day, the conditions were warm, dry, and sunny, promising excellent opportunities for the significant number of railway enthusiasts who shadowed the train, recording it with both photographs and video.

After a delay departing Horsham due to a point failure, the train arrived in Dimboola just after 10 am.

The thirty-seven kilometre journey to Jeparit took about an hour, and during a brief stop there, some passengers left the train to spend some time at the Wimmera Mallee Pioneer Museum.

The next thirty kilometres of the journey to Rainbow took forty minutes, with an arrival at midday.

While the passengers either enjoyed lunch at Yurunga Homestead or took advantage of the many local businesses that were open for the occasion, the train crew took the locomotive a further three kilometres north to the current end of the line, just past Graincorp’s loading site on Wheatlands Road.

After enjoying two hours in Rainbow, the passengers boarded the train for the return journey at 2 pm.

A twenty-minute stop at Jeparit allowed patrons to stretch their legs again and get the obligatory photos of the train at another rarely visited location.

The train then continued back to Dimboola and, after another brief stop, returned to stable at Horsham for the night before returning to Seymour on Monday.


This was only the third passenger train to run on this line since it was converted to standard gauge in 1995.

The first was a tour organised by the ACT branch of the Australian Railway Historical Society that travelled on the then recently re-gauged grain lines in Western Victoria in March 1997, and the most recent was twenty-five years ago, to mark the Centenary of the opening of the railway extension to Rainbow in 1999.