Switching Room

The switching room in the ATL Building at Nancarrow Avenue, Meadowbank, holds a 415V main switch panel standing open against a stained wall. Conduit and cable trail across a concrete floor buried under debris. Double steel doors open onto a second room beyond, and graffiti marks the paintwork around them. Whatever this room controlled, the infrastructure of it remains: heavy wiring, panel doors swung wide, the hardware of a building that once ran on precision. Automatic Totalisators Limited built the Meadowbank factory in 1947, relocating from 182 Chalmers Street near Central Station. It was the company's third and final manufacturing site, purpose-built on Nancarrow Avenue, a street that did not exist before ATL created it. Two buildings occupied the site: the main factory housing the floor, warehouse, and offices; and a separate amenities building with dressing rooms, showers, and canteen for the workforce. The main building carried an Art Deco facade and an ATL diamond motif set into the foyer floor. From Meadowbank, ATL supplied mechanical and electromechanical totalisator systems to racecourses across 29 countries. The company also manufactured automatic turnstiles, hospital communication systems, vehicle registration plates, and commercial signs. In 1966, ATL developed the world's first computer totalisator system. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, electromechanical systems gave way to electronic and computer-based ones, and manufacturing at Meadowbank declined. ATL's operations passed to the Smorgan group in 1980 and to AWA around 1988. Through the 1990s and 2000s the factory building found new tenants: a gym, a church, office space, a dance school. The switching room and the infrastructure around it date from the building's later configuration, likely placed during or after the transition to electronic systems in the 1960s and 1970s. The ATL Building was locally heritage-listed under Ryde LEP No 105 in 2003. The Planning Assessment Commission approved its demolition in principle in 2013, and the building was cleared around 2016. These photographs from 2015 are among the last records of the interior before it was gone.