Eveleigh, New South Wales - 1887-present

Eveleigh Paint Shop

The Eveleigh Railway Workshops opened in 1887 to service the rolling stock of the NSW Government Railways. The complex covered 30 hectares on the southern edge of Sydney, with separate facilities for carriage building, blacksmithing, boiler work, and the paint shop where locomotives were finished before returning to service.

The paint shop is one of the largest surviving Victorian-era industrial buildings in Australia. Iron trusses span 40 metres across tracks that could accommodate 12 locomotives simultaneously. The clerestory windows along the roofline were sized for the ventilation a working paint shop required, not for the quality of light that now characterises the interior.

The workshops changed function over their century of operation as steam gave way to diesel and the railway maintenance workforce contracted and expanded with the economy. The paint shop had been out of heavy use for some years before the broader Eveleigh site began its transition to the Australian Technology Park and CarriageWorks arts venue.

The building has been retained and is used for events. The truss structure, the overhead crane infrastructure, and the spatial logic of a building designed to hold large machines remain intact.