Southwest Queensland Coal Trains | The Cairns Railfan

Hello everyone, welcome to my first video for 2024!
In late December, I went down to the southwest of Queensland for about a week, and filmed various Aurizon coal trains around the areas between Spring Bluff, Toowoomba, Dalby and Warra. This video compiles all of the trains I saw during the 3 day recording effort! This video includes far more rail action than what I previously covered a year ago on Dalby, that video is 10 minutes long while this one is an hour long!
Today, the coal trains we will be seeing are traversing the West Moreton System, a 314 kilometre (195 mile) section of Queensland Rail owned track starting about 60 kilometres (37 miles) west of Queensland's capital city, Brisbane, at Rosewood and ending at Miles further west. Like the majority of Queensland's railway network, the West Moreton System is 3ft 6in gauge.
The area of the West Moreton System we will mostly be focusing on today is between Toowoomba and Warra; where coal dominates the rail hauled freight on the line. Grain and cattle is also hauled; but far less common than the coal trains (at least when I was there that is). A singular passenger train also runs twice a week through this line, it's known as the Westlander but due to the absurd hours it gets to Dalby (1am heading west, 4am heading east) I decided not to see it as I already saw it at Dalby Railway Station last year anyway which can be found in my previous Dalby video.
Aurizon is the railway company that hauls all the coal trains around this area. They are a privatised rail freight company which was formed around the early 2010s from the previously nationalised government run company known as QR National, which was a freight dedicated branch from Queensland Rail's core passenger services. Like QR National once did, Aurizon operates nationally all over Australia instead of just within the state of Queensland. Interestingly, a few Aurizon locomotives still have QR National labels on them; sometimes even remaining almost entirely in the QR National "Eagle" livery instead of Aurizon's modern day "Pineapple" and Pure Yellow liveries, we will be seeing some of these locomotives today.
The locomotives in question that are most commonly seen on this system are known as the Clydes; a range of locomotive classes with similar designs that are nicknamed as such due to their design origins coming from previous Clyde Engineering locomotives built for use in Queensland. A "Clyde" usually refers to the 2170, 2250, 2300, 2400, 2470, 2700 and 2900 class of locomotives. Specifically, we will be seeing primarily 2300 Classes in this video, but also a look at the relatively new 2700 Class that were first introduced into service during 2019. I would like to give special thanks to Lachlan Campbell for being a big help in assisting me with train activity around the area and with additional information for this video as he is a trainspotter local to the southwest of Queensland. You can go to his RUclips channel here: / @lachlancampbell3058
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Intro and Outro Music was created by RKvc and is called "Fused" and was made for the RUclips Audio Library. Here is the link to the song: • Fused (Audio) ∙ “MAKE ...