CPH railmotor
diesel train in Australia
The CPH (or 42 foot) rail motors were introduced by the New South Wales Government Railways in 1923 to provide feeder service on country branch lines.
Introduction
Often referred to as "Tin Hares", having evolved at the same time as the mechanical lures used in greyhound racing in Australia, the first vehicle was placed in service on 17 December 1923 and based at Culcairn, in southern New South Wales.
Construction
They were lightweight vehicles and considerable care was taken in the original selection of materials used in their construction. One of the most innovative features was the underframe, taking the form of a modified Warren truss (containing additional vertical struts). No bolts or rivets were used in its construction and it was fabricated entirely by electric arc welding. It is believed to be the first application of such technique on a railway vehicle in Australia.
The body was of timber construction, using mainly Queensland yellow wood, pines and cedars. The cars were finished externally with tongue and grooved timber below the window line.
In addition, five similar non-powered trailer cars were constructed between 1926 and 1927. The body for these cars was constructed in a similar manner and dimensions to their powered counterparts, but were mounted on a lighter "C" section steel underframe.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “CPH railmotor” as diesel train in Australia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5013643. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1926 and 1927.
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This entry incorporates text from “CPH railmotor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.