By Garry Maddox
A fire glows in a boiler, steam hisses, the arrow on a gauge starts to move – just after dawn, a famous Australian steam train slowly comes alive and pulls out of a railway yard.
The start of what has been called the country’s greatest railway film, A Steam Train Passes, captures the majestic sights and sounds of the gleaming green 3801. An art deco locomotive that was still taking passengers on tours until recently, it trails a plume of smoke as it accelerates past suburban yards, over railway bridges and through paddocks.
The 3801 from A Steam Train Passes.Credit: Fairfax
When the train stops, pipe-smoking driver Chris O’Sullivan and fireman Harold Fowler cook their breakfast of bacon and eggs on a shovel in the engine’s boiler.
Made just over half a century ago, A Steam Train Passes was originally shown as a short before the cinema release of the Australian films Sunday Too Far Away and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own. Now it is making a brief stop in cinemas again.
Screenings organised by the National Film and Sound Archive and Transport Heritage NSW will celebrate its remastering in high-definition 4K.
A beautifully made, 21-minute film that plays without narration – just the sounds of the train, boarding passengers and a stirring score – it won Australian Film Institute and Melbourne International Film Festival awards.
The stunning cinematography was by then-little-known cameraman Dean Semler, who sometimes stood on a platform atop a station wagon racing alongside the train; for other shots, he was in a speedboat and a plane.
Legendary Australian director George Miller was so impressed by the film that he hired Semler to shoot Mad Max 2, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the landmark miniseries The Dismissal. He went on to a celebrated Hollywood career that included winning an Oscar for Dances with Wolves.
“It captured a time in Australia,” Miller says in a “making of” film that is screening with A Steam Train Passes.
That time was the end of the steam train era.
The 3801 about to leave Sydney’s Central Station in 2007.Credit: Tamara Dean
While train enthusiasts loved them – and still do – railway executives in the 1970s saw them as old-fashioned and dirty compared with more modern diesel trains.
Director David Haythornthwaite, 81, made A Steam Train Passes for government agency Film Australia, opting to focus on the steam train instead of the diesels proposed by the railway public relations team.
“I went out to the railway workshops and saw the firing up process and that inspired me completely,” he says. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is something really special’. It’s an extraordinary thing, a steam engine.”
Having spent five years travelling to school in Perth on a steam train, Haythornthwaite wanted to show the 3801 gradually travelling into the past – back to when it carried soldiers off to World War II.
While recognising the crew took risks that would be unthinkable now, he describes it as a thoroughly enjoyable film to make.
“We were all little boys playing with a big train set,” he says.
Archive curator Jeff Wray, who is a former railway signalman and assistant stationmaster, describes A Steam Train Passes as an iconic film that is very popular among rail heritage fans.
“It’s an ode to steam, harking back to the golden years,” he says. “I grew up at Bungendore [east of Canberra] as a station master’s son, and that sort of equipment and those sounds were very much a part of my youth.”
Wray thinks there is a growing interest in railway history, especially the steam train era. Just as Sydney has the 3801, Melbourne has the nostalgic appeal of Puffing Billy.
“It almost seems like every country town has a rail monument of some description or a railway station, and we’re seeing a lot of museums coming back,” he says.
The 3801 travels across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2022.Credit: Edwina Pickles
The restored 3801 is based at the NSW Rail Museum at Thirlmere, south-west of Sydney. While other steam trains are operating, a mechanical issue has stopped it from being used for tours until the middle of the year.
“A Steam Train Passes isn’t just about the locomotive,” Wray says. “It’s about the whole steam era of railways, with manually operated signal boxes, stations manned with a station master and the passengers. You’ve got people being dependent on steam as a means of transportation.”
A Steam Train Passes screens at Sydney’s Cremorne Orpheum on April 2 and at the National Film and Sound Archive’s Arc Cinema in Canberra on April 6. It can also be rented on the archive’s website.
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