Gundagai Railway Station.

[Bus 400]

This afternoon I decided to take a trip out to Gundagai Railway Station, here is the result:


Gundagai is on a branch line that leaves the Great Southern Line near Cootamundra & extends to Tumut, this line has been shut for about 30 years. A story I heard from the "caretaker" at Gundagai Station is that back in the 1930's, the station was quite busy. The station was built in 1886.


We start off with the station building:



Next is the weigh station:



Then the signal box:



We then have a look as the line heads south to Tumut & over that famous old bridge (keep this in mind for the next thread).



Then as the line heads north towards Cootamundra:



This is the freight station, I was informed there was an inch of moss covering the brickwork around the crane. It was blasted off last weekend.






Now I have a little question from the caretaker at the Gundagai Railway Station:
Did this black boxes have covers on the top?







Now for those who wonder what these are, I can't really help. But I did work out that if you turn the box, the railway line moves (the line second to the right of the box). So when the arrow was pointing left, that piece of rail was touching the piece of rail to its left. Then when the little circle is showing, the lines aren't touching. I hope that makes sense to the confused.

[smitho]

Gundagai Station was pretty busy even in the 1970s and 1980s...plenty of parcels traffic right through to the time the line closed; also reasonably passenger traffic and there were gangers and station staff working there through to the end. For a time, Gundagai was the terminus in Victorian times, until it was extended through to Tumut and Batlow....I think that occurred in the first decade or two of the 20th century.

Has been talk over many years about reinstating the line for forestry product freight ex the Tumut district. Part of its right of way is now under the double carriageway-Hume Highway (the stretch near Colac Station)...or is it Coolac? Can never remember..

[Bus 400]

Having just done a quick search of "Gundagai Railway" I found this council document about the future of the line http://www.gundagai.nsw.gov.au/files/2577/File/RailTrailProposal.pdf

[smitho]

That's pretty interesting Bus 400. I know successive NSW governments have been pretty unsupportive of railtrail proposals through many parts of rural NSW - just no interest. What a contrast with most other states in Australia. I belong to the nationwide RailTrails Australia organisation which lobbies in support of new railtrails - I know that they have got pretty p...... off with the apathy of NSW governments on railtrails. 

[Sir Pompously]

That little black box I believe is a Catchpoint Indicator. http://ardp5.tripod.com/topic42.html shows what looks to be a completed indicator, with lamp.

[smitho]

Yeah, you're right there Sir P. You tend to see them more on the old South Australian Railways system.

Postscript: In the early days of the train replacement service, the State Rail road motor (which evolved into a contracted Countrylink bus) used to call into Gundagai Station to pick up/set down passengers.

As I recall, the line's extensive parcels traffic was never transferred over to the bus service - instead carried by lorries out of State Rail's Cootamundra Freight Centre (now long since closed).

[Busnerd]

Such a sad sight seeing all these old disused railways, if only the government would spend money on infrastructure for VFT, you could possibly even utilise these old lines, im sure it would take many motorists off the road if they could get a train from gundagai to sydney or melbourne...