The Bluebird railcars were a class of self-propelled diesel-hydraulic railcar built by the South Australian Railways' Islington Railway Workshops between 1954 and 1959.
Bluebird 252 "Blue Wren" at Millicent, July 1983
Preserved Bluebird no. 257 operating at the National Railway Museum, Port Adelaide, 2021
Interior of a South Australian Railways 'Bluebird' railcar (250 class second-class passenger power car)
Bluebird 257 stopped at Jacketts siding, the National Railway Museum's station for broad gauge trains before it was demolished for the Port Dock extension project
The National Railway Museum, Port Adelaide, South Australia is the largest railway museum in Australia. More than 100 major exhibits, mainly from the South Australian Railways (SAR) and Commonwealth Railways and their successor, Australian National, are displayed at its 3.5 hectares site. A very large archival collection of photographs of those railways and records created by them is also managed by the museum. The museum is operated with a large number of volunteers.
The Ron Fitch Pavilion at the museum
Locomotive Peronne hauls a special train on narrow-gauge – 1067 millimetres (3 feet 6 inches) – track at the museum; track on the left is for miniature train rides around the site.
The South Australian Railways owned 129 diminutive Y and Yx class locomotives on its narrow-gauge system from 1885. Beyond Y97 is the broad-gauge 500 ("Mountain") class locomotive number 504, one of 10 introduced in 1926 to haul trains unaided over the Mount Lofty Range. The 500 class was almost 3 times as powerful than the Rx class that it displaced, and 41⁄2 times more powerful than its museum neighbour.
Steam engine Bub, which hauls visitor trains around the museum