It's a massive joy for me to be able
to spend time with my grandfather and dad from the locomotive.
He doesn't know where to sit down for five minutes.
They always get up and do something.
As they say, ants in his pants, and that's what it is.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dad's been the innaugural person to pick up the brush down here and start painting.
I think he's painted about every single carriage and loco once,
or some of them, maybe twice.
He's a sicker for using the brush.
Then he'd say it was sprayed on.
Three coats of paint.
And I can do with a brush
100 percent better than I can spraying.
I've been painting here for 30 years.
It takes about six months to clean everything down properly.
This here loco, I've just about completed this.
Got a little bit of a spot up the top there that I've missed.
So I've got to go up there and do it.
The Don Railway Line travels down
picturesque river, through the bush lands, roads.
It's beautiful. Coals Beach.
Before I return back to the Dons.
1973, I come down here
to just have a squiz at the railway and see what it was all about.
I brought young Grannt with me, of course.
You just got that involved with trying to...because
we left our wives and the other children at the beach.
We forgot about them.
We'd never...they had to walk home.
Yeah, I was six, and seeing what they were doing, rebuilding the line.
My dad started coming down and....
And I was just born into it.
I didn't really have the choice.
It all started with Thomas the Tank.
I always had that passion.
So I'm a steam driver now at the Don River Railway.
Sort of a lifelong journey to get to that point.
You know, most people don't like an early start in the middle of winter.
My grandfather, 5:00, 6:00 in the morning
is an average day.
Early for morning, you got to prepare your locomotive.
It takes a while to get the steam up to the right pressure.
Unfortunately, on the wet days, you're going backwards down the track.
All the rain just pours in on top of you.
The driver on the right hand side, he's got to have his window open,
so he cops all the wet weather, which is good.
The little things of that driving a steam
locomotive - lifting the regulator, which makes the wheels smooth.
It's quite a feeling to to feel that power.
Pulling the whistle, the smell, the sounds.
Colder days when the steam sits in the air a lot longer.
You've got rejecter, basically
gives your vacuum to your cylinders to help break your train.
Someone's got to keep the fire going and keep the steam up
because if you run out of steam, you just come to a halt.
In other words, the fireman's the better one of the two.
Yeah.
It's a big, big pressure on the fireman.
Oh, you got the old fellow doing the hard stuff.
Now rest assured we are all taking turns.
And they might want to wear the old fella out first, I reckon.
Me, I decide for us,
and I hope to keep on painting for the next five to six years
and enjoy every bit of it.
It's something that, yeah, not many people get to experience.
Yeah, we feel very privileged to be in a position where we can operate
these beautiful big steam engines.