The Very First Passengers
Photo:- Courtesy Mrs. Brenda Shields.
A colourful incident in the history of Purring Billy is little known to anyone but the lady involved. She lives today at Kalorama in the Dandenong Ranges. Miss Helen Calcutt, as a baby of a few months old with her mother, rode in a box placed between the bumpers of the locomotive, while her father, who had surveyed the line, rode with the engine driver to celebrate the first trial run in 1900.
Her
father, Francis Macnamara Calcutt, was born in 1870 in Williamstown. He
was the eldest son in a family of 14 and left school at the age of 13 years. Far the next
47 years he worked for the Victorian Railways; attending night school he eventually became
a civil engineer and surveyed many other lines in Victoria besides the narrow gauge line
which ran at first between Ferntree Gully and Gembrook.
While he was working on the line, Frank Calcutt arranged for his wife to live in Ferntree Gully and be driven out to visit him on the job. Wherever he was working she would stay in the nearest town. She used to tell her daughter of some of the difficulties encountered in rougher areas in Gippsland. How a drunken coachman found it necessary to tie a lag onto the back of the coach to slow it up; and how it could take her husband sometimes all day to clamber from one hill to the next.
Frank Calcutt should not only be remembered for his early surveying work. He had written a thesis on the signalling system and in 1913 he was sent overseas by the Government of Victoria to examine the signalling systems of England, Germany and North America. On his return he installed the automatic signalling system of Victoria and the automatic coupling system both of which were later extended to other States.
He was also honorary secretary for the Society of Civil Engineers when Sir John Monash was president.
After eight years as Chief Engineer of Signals and Telegraphs Mr. Calcutt retired in 1932 and went to live in the house he had built for retirement in the Dandenongs. He died in 1950.
Miss Helen Calcutt still lives in this house. Although she worked in the city all her 50 years of working life Helen cared for her mother until at the age of 89, she was transferred to a nursing home in Olinda. But Helen’s main interest at Kalorama is the rambling garden. This is full of flowering trees and shrubs. Amongst the many camellias is one named far her by the camellia specialist, George Linton, of Somersby, N.S.W.