Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Exploring New South Wales: Albury Station

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Railway Station, Albury, New South Wales, Australia

Railway Station, Albury, New South Wales, Australia

There was a time when travelling between New South Wales and Victoria involved going through customs.

When the railway lines first reached the Murray River, from Melbourne to the Victoria border-town of Wodonga in 1873 and from Sydney to the New South Wales side at Albury in 1881, there was no rail bridge:  passengers had to transfer by coach.

Even when the rail bridge was completed in 1883, passengers still had to transfer across the platform because the two railways ran to different gauges:  the Victoria North Eastern Railway was built to the Irish broad gauge of 5ft 3in, while the New South Wales Great Southern Railway had the British standard gauge of 4ft 8½in.

The fine station at Albury, designed by the NSW Government Railways’ Chief Engineer, John Whitton (1820-1899), is distinguished by its 1,480-foot covered island platform which allowed inter-state passengers to transfer between the gauges – an experience which astonished Mark Twain:  “…a singular thing, the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the unaccountable marvel that Australia can show, namely the break of gauge at Albury. Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth.”

Though the Commonwealth of Australia was constituted in 1901, oversight of transport policy remained with the individual states, and it took until 1962 to complete a standard-gauge through connection between Melbourne and Sydney.

This produced the anomaly of a twin-track railway between Melbourne and Albury operating as two single lines, one of each gauge.

The remaining broad-gauge track on this route was converted to standard gauge between 2008 and 2011.

The state boundary at Albury-Wodonga is practical, yet appeared to me invisible:  the adjacent towns are, after all, both part of the Commonwealth of Australia.  A similar conjunction on the border between Canada and the US state of Vermont is more vexatious:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20649024.

 

Flxible Clipper

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Ansett Roadways Flxible Clipper, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Ansett Roadways Flxible Clipper, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

I was walking along a street in Launceston, Tasmania, when I came across this strange beast of a bus.

When I got home my friend Doug, who likes buses, helped me to track its provenance.

It’s a Flxible Clipper, an American design dating from 1937 that was imported to Australia in 1947 by Sir Reginald Ansett (1909-1981).

Reg Ansett was an inspired Australian entrepreneur:  he began running buses and taxis between the towns of western Victoria, and then founded Ansett Airways in 1936.  His airline became the basis for investment in hotels and television as well as interests in Diners’ Club and Bic pens.

This particular vehicle is the American original, from which Reg Ansett built a further 105 (or 131, depending on the source,) under licence.  It now belongs to Ken Turnbull, who drove it in the 1950s, bought it in 1974 and restored it to original condition.

There are at least another sixteen Flxible Clippers on the road in Australia, but all the others are converted into motor homes:  http://www.commercialmotor.com/big-lorry-blog/the-fabulous-flxible-clippera.

They are revered for their durability and speed and their inimitable style.  In the USA they were known as “the DC3 of highway buses”:  http://flxibleowners.org/breeds-of-flxibles.

A 1951 Australian model figures in this clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9BYu6BqJo.

Flxible, by the way, is pronounced “Flexible”:  the vowel was dropped for trade-mark purposes in 1919.

 

Sleeping cars

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Railway Square YHA, Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Railway Square YHA, Central Station, Sydney, Australia

On one of my rail trips out of Sydney Central Station during my lecture-tour for the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, I gazed across the platforms and noticed a group of obviously ancient passenger carriages.  I couldn’t tell from my viewpoint whether they were parked at a couple of platforms or grounded.

They belong to the Railway Square YHA, one of many Sydney bases for backpackers and people visiting a city on a budget.

Its website http://www3.yha.com.au/Hostels/NSW/Sydney-Surrounds/Railway-Square invites prospective guests to “stay in one of the funky railway carriages on the former Platform Zero or one of the comfy rooms in the historic 1904 main building, now converted into contemporary accommodation.”

It’s apparent from the reviews that it’s a noisy night’s stay – if the other guests don’t disturb you with lively conversation, the trains on the adjacent platforms will.

That said, there are far, far worse places to rest your head in Sydney.

 

Upstairs, downstairs

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Central Station approach, Sydney, Australia

Central Station approach, Sydney, Australia

New South Wales suburban and outer-suburban trains are double-deckers, built to the generous Australian loading-gauge, based on the pre-war French prototype, the Voiture État à deux étages.

The doorways at the end of each carriage lead to a mezzanine level, which is used by passengers with pushchairs or wheeled luggage, and stairs lead up and down to the two central compartments.

It’s an odd sensation to sit so high above rail-level on the top deck, and even odder to sit below-decks with the platform edge skimming the windows.

Double-deck carriages twenty metres long carry nearly 50% more passengers than single-deck rolling stock of equivalent length, saving the huge expense of lengthening station platforms.

To allow for the low-slung centre section, designers had to move as much electrical and mechanical equipment as possible on to the roof above the entrances.

The first of double-deck trailer cars were introduced in 1964, followed by double-deck motor cars four years later.  Interurban double-deck trains, with an additional burden of air-conditioning units, followed in 1970.

Travelling to outer Sydney, with little idea of direction let alone distance, I was anxious to know what level of creature comforts my train would provide.

I quizzed the travel-information officer about on-board lavatories in my best Pommie accent.  He replied, “You’re in the wrong country mate.”

Ask a silly question.

 

Exploring Sydney: Wynyard Station

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Wynyard Station, Sydney, Australia

Wynyard Station, Sydney, Australia

In just over four weeks of travelling to give lectures for Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies I got lost only once, and that was in the middle of Sydney.

Wynyard Station, on the City Circle, has two exits, and I took the wrong one, so that I had to wander the streets to find a hotel that’s almost next to the other entrance.  C’est la vie.  The travel co-ordinator revised the map for my successor.

I got used to Wynyard Station in my comings and goings, and realised that the building above the platforms is a rather fine piece of Art Deco, with lots of jazzy detail in pale green faience.  Next to the York Street entrance (the one I needed) is a doorway leading to the Department of Railways offices. 

The station was designed by John Bradfield (1867-1943), and opened in 1932, as part of the transport links that served the Sydney Harbour Bridge.  Originally it was a terminus, until the City Loop between Wynyard and St James via Circular Quay was completed in 1956.

The platforms at Wynyard are numbered 3 to 6.  The original platforms 1 and 2 were intended for the unbuilt Northern Beaches line [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bradfield_Scheme_Sydney_CBD_Railways_alt.png – compare with the eventual network:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sydney_CBD_Railways_built.png].

As an interim measure the Northern Beaches platforms and approaches were used for the North Shore tram services that crossed the Harbour Bridge.

When the trams were abandoned in 1958 the trackbed over the bridge was adapted to make two further motor-vehicle lanes, and the platforms at Wynyard were used for car-parking.

A 2009 discussion paper proposed to build a Fast North Shore Line [http://www.dab.uts.edu.au/research/outcomes/garry-glazebrook-attach.pdf, Attachment 5, page 1] which would reinstate heavy rail on the Harbour Bridge and into the unused platforms at Wynyard.

This alignment could also be used for a long-term plan for a high-speed rail-link between Newcastle, north of Sydney, and Canberra to the south.

What goes around comes around.

There is in fact a complex archaeology of unused or disused rail tunnels under the centre of Sydney. 

There is a faintly fanciful video-clip of the tunnels under St James Station, also on the City Loop, at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAsTUZkj0u4], an article from the Sydney Morning Herald that illustrates an uncompleted tunnel, abandoned in 1932, at North Sydney Station across the harbour 5km north of Sydney Central [http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/ghost-trains-the-forgotten-rail-network/2007/07/20/1184560040257.html], and a photo-album of tunnels at Central, Redfern, and North Sydney stations [http://www.railpage.org.au/trainman/tunnels.htm].

 

Victorian railway hubris

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Former Lord Street Station, Southport, Lancashire (2012)

Former Lord Street Station, Southport, Lancashire (2012)

The Southport & Cheshire Lines Extension Railway was never a good idea:  it opened from Aintree Central, formerly a terminal station, on September 1st 1884 to an impressive new station next to the Southport Winter Gardens, fronting on to Lord Street.

It was a creation of the Cheshire Lines Committee, a consortium of the Great Northern, the Midland and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire (later Great Central) Railways which managed a collection of lines stretching into their competitors’ territory.  Less than half the Cheshire Lines lines were actually in Cheshire.

The idea behind the S&CLER was to compete with the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway’s service from Liverpool Exchange, which ran directly north-west via Bootle and Formby to Southport Chapel Street station in the centre of town.

The S&CLER, however, ran from Liverpool Central Station, southwards to Hunt’s Cross, and then round the back suburbs of Liverpool through Gateacre and Aintree before crossing to a coastal approach to Southport Lord Street.

No-one in their right mind wanting to travel from the centre of Liverpool to the centre of Southport would take the Cheshire Lines route.

It may have been fairly busy at the height of the summer season, but outside the holiday period services were so unprofitable that they were closed as an economy measure between January 1917 and April 1919.

The only time the line was heavily used was a period of a few weeks in 1940, when Liverpool Exchange Station was closed by bombing.

Although British Railways extended the platforms for longer trains in the late 1940s, the Lord Street passenger service was closed on January 1st 1952, and freight services along the line followed shortly after.

The track-bed of the S&CLER between Southport and Woodvale now forms the Coastal Road, and a further section is used as the Cheshire Lines Cycle Path.

The Lord Street train-shed was adapted as a bus station for Ribble Motor Services, simply by filling the trackbeds level with the platforms.

The bus station closed in 1987, and the train-shed was demolished in 1993.  The site was subsequently redeveloped as a supermarket, but the street frontage remained unused and derelict until the iron-and-glass verandas became dangerous and had to be demolished.

The building is due to open as a Travelodge hotel in 2013:  http://www.otsnews.co.uk/update-travelodge-hotel-ribble-building-lord-street-southport-nov-21st-2012.

The best illustrated account of Lord Street Station is at http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/s/southport_lord_street/index.shtml.

 

Prague without a guide-book: the Mayor’s Tram

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Tramway Museum, Prague, Czech Republic: Mayor's Tram no 200

Tramway Museum, Prague, Czech Republic: Mayor’s Tram no 200

During my ramblings round Prague I found my way on to the Historická tramva, the “historic tram”, which charged off up the hairpin slope Chotkova and eventually ground its way into a tram depot at a place called Střešovice.  In the absence of anything else to do, I followed a desultory crowd to the far end of the track fan and found my way into the Prague Tramway Museum, which for a little over £1 displays dozens of trams, trolleybuses, motorbuses and associated paraphernalia in immaculate condition:  http://www.dpp.cz/en/urban-mass-transit-museum.  

This is no work-in-progress like the Sydney Tramway Museum:  it looks for all the world as if they could run a historic fleet of several dozen trams, but for the fact that there is another, operational historic fleet at the other end of the depot.

The most endearing of these antique vehicles was the Mayor’s Tram, no 200, designed by the leading Art Noveau architect Jan Kotěra (1871-1923) and built by the Ringhoffer Company in 1900. 

Its headlamps are garlanded with delicately moulded metal leaves, and its interior consists of comfortable chairs and occasional tables, designed for the city councillors to meet and converse while riding in state through the streets.

When new it was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition, and subsequently carried every mayor of Prague until 1951.  Thereafter it became a transport for nursery schoolchildren until it was acquired by the Tramway Museum after it opened in 1993:  http://www.praha.eu/jnp/en/past_future/history_of_prague/one_of_the_oldest_trams_still_operating.html.

Tram city

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Malá Strana [Lesser Quarter], Prague, Czech Republic

When I first visited Prague I had a flashback moment in the taxi from the airport.

My antennae twitch when I see tram-tracks, not only because my parents taught me to read (in block capitals) and count (in Gills Sans) by means of the trams running past our house in the late 1940s, but also because whenever we left Sheffield by road or rail our return was always marked by a competition to see who could first see a cream-and-blue Sheffield tram or bus.  And there were, in my early childhood, rather more trams than buses on the streets.

So when I first spotted a red-and-cream Prague tram (or trams – they mostly seem to run as attached pairs), I had a flashback to 1968, when the Crich tramway museum hit the national headlines because an antique Prague tram, with its minders, narrowly escaped the Soviet army arriving to extinguish Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/45777493@N06/6036451806.

Prague is in fact a tram city, rather like Melbourne.  Most major streets have tram-tracks and there are services twenty-four hours a day.  A twenty-four-hour travel pass costs the equivalent of just over £3.

From my hotel near the metro-station I P Pavolva (named after a Russian physiologist), I found the 22 tram invaluable.  It crosses the river, threads its way through the Old Town (passing at one point through a tiny arch you would think twice about driving a bus through) and climbs hairpin bends up Chotkova to the level of the Castle (and returns with suitable caution down the slippery slope).

But I also made a point, as I do still with London buses, of hopping on and off at random simply to see the city unfold before me.

By that means I learnt my way round Prague without a guidebook, and found some remarkable and unexpected places.

The most perfect of all station houses 1

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Wingfield Station, South Wingfield, Derbyshire (1976)

Wingfield Station, South Wingfield, Derbyshire (1976)

The 2012 version of the Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list headlined Wingfield Station, Derbyshire of 1840, by Francis Thompson (1808-1895), one of the very first architects to specialise in designing railway buildings: Wingfield Station, Derbyshire | Victorian Society.

The Transport Trust considers that “Francis Thompson’s best work was on the North Midland Railway, between Derby and Leeds”, yet all the others have disappeared, apart from one small isolated structure at Chesterfield and his Railway Village, next to the main station in Derby.

Wingfield Station appeared, transformed into a suburban villa, in a supplement to John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture.

As long ago as 1950 Christian Barman, author of the pioneer study An Introduction to Railway Architecture, described it as “the most perfect of all station houses”.

Passenger services ceased in 1967, but trains still thunder past twenty-four hours a day:  the North Midland line remains a major trunk route between Sheffield and London, and between the North East and South West of England.

Soon after the station closed to passengers it was bought as a residence, but the passing trains must have made life intolerable.  For several decades the building has simply been left to rot, and lead thefts have led to extensive water damage.

The Victorian Society commentary unequivocally lays the blame for the dire condition of this beautiful little building on neglect by the private owner and negligence by the local planning authority, Amber Valley Council:  “The building has seen too much time go by to wait any longer. The council needs to take action urgently:  compulsory purchase looks to be the only answer.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the national publicity will lead to a burst of energy from a cash-strapped council.

Even more interesting will be the search for a practical use for an elegant station building with too many trains and no passengers.

Snow Hill revived

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Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

The absurdities of Victorian railway competition are only equalled by the profligate waste of the railway closures in the 1960s.

Birmingham’s two main stations lie at right-angles to each other, on different levels and several hundred yards apart, because three entirely separate and competing companies built the lines into Birmingham.

The Great Western Railway’s Snow Hill Station, first opened in 1852, developed into a magnificent red-brick and terracotta structure of 1911-12 behind J A Chatwin’s grand Great Western Hotel of 1875.

In 1961 a scheme was published to turn Snow Hill into “the most modern railway terminal in Europe”.

As late as 1964, during the electrification of the West Coast Main Line, it handled 130,000 trains and 7,500,000 passengers, compared with 175,000 trains and 10,000,000 passengers at New Street.

Later in the 1960s many former GWR services were closed or diverted to the redeveloped New Street, except for Stratford and Warwick local services which terminated at the suburban-relief station at Moor Street, south of the Inner Ring Road.

The Great Western Hotel was demolished in 1971.  Snow Hill Station itself remained derelict after the last train-service finished in 1972, became structurally unsafe and was eventually cleared in 1979.

However, from 1987 the Moor Street services again ran through the reopened tunnel, and a new Snow Hill Station was incorporated in the unlovely Colmore Court office-development.

Since 2001 the Birmingham to Wolverhampton service of the West Midlands Metro has used a platform of Snow Hill station as its city-centre terminus.

So, apart from the fact that more trains run from Moor Street than Snow Hill, and the second London service runs to Marylebone rather than Paddington, there are relatively few significant differences in the availability of services now than there were in 1960.

Hindsight is a wonderful luxury, but I can’t help wondering if the planners’ plans really added up correctly in the 1960s, any more than the haphazard eccentricities of Victorian laissez-faire did 110 years previously.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.