Trains & bikes: How our team at Maryborough are having a wheely good time

01/07/2022

At Maryborough’s Rollingstock Service Delivery Centre, trains aren’t the only transportation devices to be found on-site.

For our team at Maryborough’s Rollingstock Service Delivery, it’s not only about maintaining and manufacturing trains; bikes are also an important form of transportation.

On 3 June, the 450-strong team were encouraged to ride their bicycles into work before taking a lunchtime lap of Maryborough’s CBD.

The hi-vis biking down the main street was a sight to behold by the community, and an enjoyable way to not only take a lunch break, but to get some healthy exercise and fresh air.

The initiative was designed by the Health and Safety Committee to help promote a healthy lifestyle as well as a green campaign to encourage biking to work.

However, it’s not just in 2022 that riding bikes to site was encouraged.

Riding bikes to work is a historical activity undertaken at our Maryborough site where once upon a time, hundreds of employees on site would all finish work at the same time, cycling down Kent Street where the police would shut down the street to let the bikes through.

The bike rides were so famous in town, that the community have a photo etched on Kent Street recognising the riders, which shows Terry Jackson in the middle, who in 2001 the Heritage Herald did an interview.

He’s quoted as saying, “after the 5 o’clock whistle blew, about 500 men from Walkers, Hynes, Shipyard and Sugarmill would ride 4 and 5 abreast down Kent Street. At the Adelaide Street intersection, a copper would come out and stop the traffic so we could ride through”

Terry’s son Mike Jackson now works for Downer and participated in our recent biking initiative.

One of the observers on the day notes: “Terry is Mike Jackson’s Dad and he worked at Walkers for many years and I have taken a couple of photos of Mike in his Downer uniform with his bike beside his Dad.

Terry has since passed but I know that he would be very proud to know that Mike is back at Downer doing what he always pictured himself doing in his years before retirement – building trains. After all, isn’t that all young fellas dream of doing one day?”

With a 150-year history in Maryborough, the ideas of the past are just as relevant today as they were then. And as our team now says, the bikes are back!