Victorian Railways – Vintage Brass Builders Plate By Newport Railway Workshops 1911 Very Rare! This is a builder’s plate from the Victorian Railways’ Newport Workshops dating from 1911. Currently mounted on a piece of wood. The Newport Railway Workshops is a facility in the Melbourne suburb of Newport, which builds, maintains and refurbishes railway rolling stock. The workshops had constructed about 536 steam locomotives and hundreds of railway passenger carriages and goods wagons and trucks by the end of the steam era in the 1960’s. At its peak the Newport Workshops employed over 5,000 people and was the largest industrial complex in the Victoria.