Queensland Railways 1300 class

The Queensland Railways 1300 class was a class of diesel locomotives built by English Electric at Rocklea for Queensland Railways between 1967 and 1972, an upgraded version of the 1270 class with more powerful engines and larger fuel tanks. They were used mainly on the Blackwater and Moura coal lines and based at Gladstone, and became surplus after the coal lines were electrified in 1986 and 1987. In 1988 the whole class was sold to AN Tasrail, where the locomotives became the ZC class and were renumbered consecutively, with 1300 becoming ZC1 and 1344 becoming ZC45, although twelve units were used only as a source of spare parts. Ten were sold to Morrison Knudsen Australia in April 1994 and eight were rebuilt with new cabs as the MKA class at its Whyalla factory, and some of these later worked in Senegal, in Malaysia and in Tasmania. Locomotive 2144, formerly ZC19 and 1318, was donated for preservation to Diesel Traction Tasmania, now the Launceston and North East Railway.