From the late 1890's the railways ran a car for testing new locomotives. The vehicle was an old 1858 carriage. It was called the Dynagraph car.
By the late 1920's, both Victoria and South Australia had larger more modern engines. Both systems jointly built a new "Dynamometer" car which entered service in 1932.
Very quickly, the Victorian system ran the car to test the differences in rolling resistances between trains of four wheel wagons and the new bogie stock purchased and built in the late 1920's.
Test were also run on the S class passenger locomotives. Included in the tests were tractive effort trials with loaded freight trains between Wallan and Seymour.
Other miscellaneous tests included suburban trials between Tait trains and the new Harris trains to service in the mid 1950's.
From 1932 to the 1970s, over 900 tests were logged.
Some of the last runs in Victoria were used to test radio recepction for the installation of "Train-to-Base" radio and "ASW" ( Alternate Safe Working ) , a radio based safeworking system.
There is a rumour that the body of this car is from the steam car that ran from 1913 and that was scrapped in 1927. To date no evidence has surfaced. Measurements and photographs have not been compared.
File c160v04 compiled by Peter J. Vincent, updated 6/7/2007