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Donnybrook, Victoria – Candy XPT

I'd previously hinted at NSW Transport's goal of painting one XPT set into the original as-delivered colour scheme, but it happened to happen right as both the standard gauge and broad gauge lines into melbourne both had weeks of track closures. It actually turns out that the standard gauge closures finished earlier than the broad gauge timetable and therefore the XPT managed to cycle through the schedule and come to melbourne! Actually, the first time it did was mid-week where I wasn't able to see it. Instead, I saw it on a weekend when it made it down overnight on a saturday. This meant it headed north on the following Sunday morning:

And you know what? After the hideous days of signal failures in Donnybrook, the XPT flogged it through. Absolutely no issues of slow speed!

Thanks to the BG being shut down, shots could be taken from the middle of the tracks. Interestingly, that light-rail truck was sitting there as the BG rail workers seemingly had the weekend off!

What happens in Dubbo?

So, they painted a full XPT set in the candy livery... but when the XPT is scheduled on the West Dubbo service, it doesn't need the sleeper carriage. This service runs with a smaller consist and the sleeper carriage gets attached to another XPT set. The initial candy set is using XP2006 at one end and XP2009 at the other... but the XAM (the sleeper carriage) was then shifted over to the XP2012/XP2019 set. This then meant that we had a new consist to track!

And so I did... it ran the overnight to Melbourne and came through Donnybrook this morning...

Lot'sa wildlife at that time of the morning... and no fellow gunzels? I was mildly disappointed!

And yeah...

It's pretty obvious! After telling some passengers that there were no BG trains and that they needed to go to the bus stop, I went home!