Radio 5SE
As you drive into Mount Gambier and you’re desperately trying to tune your car radio to receive a signal, anything, even a local channel, you’re more than likely to discover 5SE at 963AM, and the song you’re most likely to hear playing is Kenny Loggins’ classic tune ‘Footloose’.
Maybe you don’t believe me, but it’s true: Mount Gambier’s greatest and only local AM station deserves a world heritage listing. Some 5SE higher-up must have decided some time in 1983 that the whole new-fangled digital CD format was a gimmick at best and a disastrous money-sink at worst and that 5SE should stick by the seven-inch 45RPM vinyl format, as God had intended them to.
Mount Gambier continues to rock, thanks to 5SE, to the tunes of the seventies and early eighties, back when they really knew how to write songs. Gary Glitter gets equal play with DEVO. The Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’ is followed by the Who’s ‘Pinball Wizard’. Listenening to 5SE you can imagine a magical world in which Hall and Oates never separated, in which Heart and Jefferson Starship live on, and Styx continue to doubly thank Mr Roboto. [CG]
Red Hen
The “300/400” class railcars were introduced into the Adelaide railway system starting in the late 1950’s and were reliable enough to see service well into the 1990’s.Quickly christened “Red Hens” by the travelling public, they were loud, smelly contraptions that had manual doors that could be easily opened while the train was moving. This was great on hot summer days, as Red Hens were like ovens otherwise. They were also quite powerful and could easily manage the Hills line run to Bridgewater.
Come the late 1970’s and the Hens were starting to look a bit old. A new railcar was introduced, the “2000/2100” class, referred to by school kids of the day as “Supertrains”. These railcars were airconditioned (which was essential, because they had boring self closing doors and non-opening windows) and were a gleaming silver with orange highlights (did I say that this was the late 1970’s?).
Like the Red Hens, the Supertrains were diesel-electric powered. Adelaide never discovered electric trains, despite some planning in the 1920’s which went so far as to see a new hills tunnel dug with extra clearance to support overhead wires. Consequently, when the Adelaide Railway station was upgraded in the 1980’s, huge extractor fans had to be installed to vent exhaust fumes.
Unlike the Red Hens, the Supertrain diesel engines had serious shortcomings. They were extremely noisy and dirty (you do not want to be on a platform when one of these things takes off, or even be inside the engine carriage when it does) and, for all the noise, they were not powerful enough to run up the Hills line to Bridgewater, necessitating an upgrade of many engines after the units had been introduced.
Some would argue that the best thing about a Supertrain is sitting in the front seat of the passenger carriage. As the Supertrains have elevated driving cabs, the front seat looks out directly on the line ahead. It wasn’t the best place to sit for reasons of aestetics, rather it was because the moulded plastic that slopes downwards from the base of the front window to meet the carpetted wall (this was the 1970’s again) is a great place to carve your initials. Somewhere out there is a Supertrain carriage with “RLD” scratched into it by my then girlfriend.
The Supertrains were a bit more expensive than anticipated with the result that the intended replacement of the Red Hens was put on hold.
To cut costs in a uniquely South Australian way while still allowing for a new fleet of railcars, an enterprising designer came up with the idea to take the best features of the SuperTrain and apply them to the existing Red Hen sets. These railcars would have the best of both worlds, and were given the class “2500” because they would be more than the sum of their parts.
These railcars would have been wonderful too, had they been Red Hens given air conditioning and automatic doors. Instead, they were Red Hens given gleaming silver shells with orange highlights.
This series was quickly dubbed “The SuperChook”, and was so popular that one Red Hen set was given the “SuperChook” treatment before the plans were shelved.
The late 1980’s saw the development of the current railcars, the “3000” series. These railcars are bright (provided the windows are cleaned of graffitti), quiet(ish), comfortable to travel in (provided someone hasn’t been sick on the plastic floor in the past month) and have enough power to do the Hills run (if only they could—the government shut the hills line service down the year before the 3000’s entered service).
Since the last Red Hen railcar left service in the mid 1990’s, they have dispersed far and wide. Some have made their way into private collections. Some have been turned into Bed and Breakfasts. Some have made it to tourist railways where they still run, or are waiting to be put into use. Some have made it to the National Railway Museum at Port Adelaide. I believe that even “The SuperChook” was sold to a tourist railway in Victoria, poor fools.
So, in their collected retirements, the Red Hens have travelled further afield than they ever did during active service. [CL]