February 10 was a sad day in the history of this city, the apparent end of the passenger railway that had served it for a century, the culmination of a process that had seen the trains lost to Glen Innes, Tenterfield, Gunnedah, Narrabri and Moree sixteen months earlier with the axing of the vintage overnight North Mail.

It was part of an apparently inexorable trend driven by governments of different colours in the late 20th century: the retreat of passenger trains from destinations with modest populations and more distant from Sydney.  Recent history gave the crowd on that summer morning no reasonable grounds for hoping that they would ever again catch a train from Armidale, and yet they had been inspired to hope just a little.

One group of protesters had tied a model coffin to the locomotive, lamenting the death of the train at the hands of the parties in power in Macquarie Street, while others from the Friends of the Northern Railway, the FONR, had attached a banner to the back of the last carriage declaring “NOT THE LAST TRAIN”.

The train’s departure had been delayed by the protest.  When it finally began to move, a melancholy silence descended on the scene, but as the hopeful banner came into view there was suddenly something positive to discuss.  Gazing at those words slipping away past the Butler Street gatekeeper’s house the crowd were enjoying a gentle statement of defiance and optimism.

Could the Great Northern Railway in New England and the north-west line across the plains to Moree really make history by the achievement, unprecedented in New South Wales, of getting passenger trains restored onto country lines from which they had been completely withdrawn?  This possibility had been kept alive during twenty-one months of tireless campaigning by those who came together to form the FONR in May 1989, by many hundreds of people who attended meetings and wrote letters, by the attention of Ray Chappell, MP for Northern Tablelands, and his colleagues from Barwon and Tamworth and the Minister for Transport, Bruce Baird, all of whom opened their doors to hear what the community was saying, by support from local Councils, particularly Dumaresq Shire Council and Glen Innes Council, and critically, by the local news media, including the Armidale Express, which provided a vehicle for this issue to be reported comprehensively and discussed from every point of view.

The railway cause was also helped, in a way as unexpected as it was deeply shocking, by two of the worst road accidents in Australian history, the Grafton and Kempsey coach crashes which claimed a total of 56 lives in the latter months of 1989 when the FONR campaign was at its peak.

Only four months after “Not the Last Train,” the good news finally broke on Wednesday, June 13, 1990, that new diesel multiple units would be built to run to Armidale, Moree and Canberra.  It was a thrilling moment and welcome relief after much anticipation and anxious waiting but tinged with regret because Glen Innes was not to be included.

There followed a long wait while the ABB factory at Dandenong in Victoria manufactured the trains that came to be called the Xplorer, the name abbreviated to XPL echoing that of the XPT.  On Monday, November 22, 1993, passengers on the new Xplorer train running north under the Countrylink brand were told little of the changed arrangements but found to their delight that the train kept going after stopping at Tamworth and was met by a crowd ready to celebrate at Armidale.  Speeches were made, the Mayor unveiled a plaque and the joyful mood carried through to the next morning, Tuesday, November 23, when the Xplorer departed Armidale for the first time carrying passengers.  Mrs Sonja Stucken, travelling home to Sydney that day, helped to launch it on its way by smashing a bottle of champagne.

The customary division of the train at Werris Creek happened for the first time on Tuesday, so the Xplorer arrived at Moree on the evening of November 23 for similar celebrations.

In the years that followed, we who had been involved in the campaign wondered whether our efforts had been necessary or even successful.  After all, passenger trains were not restored to Glen Innes or Tenterfield on the line north of Armidale as we had hoped, while the new Xplorer to Moree was on a line kept open by coal and wheat trains.  Perhaps the politicians would have got the new trains running in 1993 as far as they did without such vigorous community lobbying.

We soon learnt that this was not so.  In 2003 Armidale had to fight hard once more to keep its trains, this time in response to the Parry Report and the determination of the Minister for Transport, Michael Costa, to match proposed improvements in the Sydney suburban trains with further cuts to regional services.

The FONR mobilised again to defend the trains to Armidale and Moree and found greatly strengthened support compared with a decade earlier, from member of parliament Richard Torbay, from the Council, the University, the schools, many businesses and the public.  When the Minister visited on October 23, 2003, to sample local opinion, three thousand people came to the rally at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning at Armidale Railway Station.  The Minister found that this community was in no mood to have its one train per day scrapped by someone who enjoyed trains at ten-minute intervals in the centre of Sydney.

Armidale’s trains were spared but the following year the government withdrew the daily XPT service to Murwillumbah via Lismore, putting the passengers on road coaches from Casino.  Today, it remains a striking fact that Armidale, Gunnedah, Narrabri and Moree continue to enjoy daily direct passenger train services from Sydney, while the university city of Lismore makes do with buses.

As we celebrate 25 years of the Xplorer at Armidale and Moree Railway Stations this Friday morning we will do so knowing that it was the demonstrated will of these communities that kept the trains running.