Victorian Railways L class electric

Victorian Railways L class

L 1162 At Newport Workshops in March 2014 alongside L 1160

Type and origin Power type Electric Builder English Electric, United Kingdom Build date 1953-1954 Total produced 25

Specifications UIC class Co-Co Gauge 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm) Wheel diameter 3 ft 4 in (1,016 mm) Length 59 ft (17.98 m) Loco weight 97 long tons 1 cwt (217,400 lb or 98.6 t) Electric system(s) 1.5 kV Direct Current Catenary Current collection Pantograph Traction motors 6x 402 hp (300 kW) English Electric Model 519

Performance figures Maximum speed 75 mph (121 km/h) Power output 2,400 hp (1,790 kW) Tractive effort 47,000 lbf (209.1 kN) starting 25,200 lbf (112.1 kN) continuous

Career Operators Victorian Railways Number in class 25 Numbers L 1150-L 1174 First run 21 April 1953 Preserved L 1150, L 1160, L 1162, L 1169 Disposition 4 preserved, 21 scrapped

The Victorian Railways L class was a class of mainline electric locomotive that ran on Australia's Victorian Railways and its successor V/Line from 1953 until 1987. Introduced in conjunction with the electrification of the Gippsland line, these locomotives hauled both passenger and freight services between Traralgon and Melbourne until the overhead electrification was decommissioned in favour of diesel electric traction.

Australia was a relatively early adopter of electric traction and Electric Multiple Unit trains, with a General Electric advertisement in Railway Age magazine of 1924 claiming that Melbourne had the largest suburban electrification scheme in the world at 346 miles (557 km). However, electrification in Victoria had until the 1950s been restricted to the Melbourne suburban network. Apart from the EMU fleet the only electric locomotives operated by the VR were a fleet of 12 small 620 hp (460 kW) E class electric locomotives, built at VR's Newport Workshops for suburban goods service, using the same General Electric traction motors and electrical equipment employed on Melbourne's EMU fleet.

During the early 1950s, Victorian Railways embarked on an £80 million program dubbed ‘Operation Phoenix’ to rebuild a network badly run down by years of Depression-era underinvestment and wartime overutilisation. This included a substantial upgrade (regrading, rerouting and electrification) of the Gippsland line servicing Victoria's substantial brown coal fields in the Latrobe Valley to allow for greatly increased traffic in briquettes for industrial use. A suitably powerful electric locomotive was sought for both express passenger and heavy freight use on the upgraded, electrified line.