As the day dawned, the engines in the shed stirred slowly awake.

“Morning y’all,” said Eric the Eighty-one Class. “Who’s coming with me to haul some grain today?” Several locos roared with delight.

“Me, take me,” pleaded Elsie. “And take us too,” added Elspeth and Ernie, who were already coupled together.

Patrick sidled over. He was a particularly ugly locomotive. Painted in rancid red and bilious yellow, he had his name in ‘try-hard’ large type on each side.

“I’m not just a bit of a shunter,” he would boast to anyone passing. “I’m part of an inter-nodal, fully integrated logistics system.”

“Haven’t you dopey diesels heard the news?” He looked up at the Eighty-ones with a smug grin. “We’re not doing grain freight any more, the Fat Controller told me so.”

“What!” Eric cried in dismay. “But the four of us can pull over 4,000 tonnes of grain in one train. That’s more than fifty double-length semi-trailer’s worth.”

“It can’t be true,” Elspeth chipped in. “The Fat Controller promised us, after we were sold to private enterprise, that more freight would get moved by rail.”

“Well,” sneered Patrick. “Weren’t you all sucked in like fossil fuel into forty thousand truck engines.

“The Fat Controller has checked his bottom line and due to the drought, takings are down, so he’s getting shot of the whole grain business.”

“It’s a scandal, that’s what it is,” Fergus the Forty-eight blurted. “We light engines work out beyond the big towns, where the roads are quite fragile.

“In an average year we haul around 40 trains. That’s going to mean 2000 extra trucks on these roads. It’s shifting the cost of transport onto local ratepayers who will be forced to fix the roads from their Council’s already stretched budget.”

“Oh, shove it in your sandboxes you lot!” Patrick blew his horn loud and long. “It’s not the F.C.’s problem what happens to rural communities. He’s got his shareholders to keep happy or he won’t get his million share options.”

“But what will become of us?” wailed the despondent diesels.

“Don’t you worry about that,” chuckled Patrick the Port Engine. “You’re all getting sent to Queensland to haul coal.”

And so, thanks to eco-rats, the railways never lived happily ever after.

In 2000, the NSW Government commissioned a report to justify its decision to offload RailCorp to the private sector. Following years of neglect and indifferent management, the railways could be shown by cost analysis to be less attractive than road freight for all except bulk haulage.

The cashed-up private freight corporations, eyeing each other warily, circled for the kill. Between the few of them they already had most freight business in Australia by the b-doubles. But to secure the railway conveyor belt between the coal mines and the seaports was an offer too good to refuse.

So, the trogs at Macquarie Street, with the exception of the Greens who refused to endorse the report, signed away the transporting of our national wealth. Unlike coal which come from a few locations, grain comes from all over inland NSW and supports hundreds of rural communities. The Farmers Federation, among others, obtained from the government guarantees that some money from the sale of FreightCorp would be used to preserve its ‘Community Service Obligations’. In other words, to stop the hard-nosed accountants who’ve never been west of Strathfield, from screwing the bush.

Now here we are in 2008. The grain transport industry has gone suddenly off the rails and rural communities are left facing a trucking nightmare.