Commonwealth Engineering
former Australian manufacturer of railway rolling stock
Commonwealth Engineering, often shortened to Com-Eng, later known as Comeng [ KOM-enj], was an Australian engineering company that designed and built railway locomotives, rolling stock and trams.
History
Smith and Waddington, the predecessor to Commonwealth Engineering, was founded in 1921, in the Sydney suburb of Camperdown, as a body builder for custom motor cars. It went bankrupt in the Great Depression, and was reformed as Waddingtons Body Works and the main factory was moved to Granville, after a fire in the main workshop. The Government of Australia took control of the company during World War II as the company was in serious financial difficulties but had many government orders in its books. The government purchased a controlling stake in the company in 1946 and changed the name to Commonwealth Engineering.
In 1949 a factory was established in Rocklea, Queensland. This was followed in 1952 by a plant in Bassendean, Western Australia and in 1954 by another in Dandenong, Victoria. Another factory was established in Braemar, NSW in 1973, as Mittagong Engineering. This was established not only to take some of the workload off the Granville plant but to potentially replace it.
In June 1957, the government sold its shares.
“Commonwealth Engineering” enters the record as former Australian manufacturer of railway rolling stock. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Commonwealth, Engineering and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Commonwealth Engineering” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Commonwealth, Engineering and former provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5153737. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1946, 1949 and 1952.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commonwealth Engineering” 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.