Ballast Truck

A ballast truck sits on the tracks at Bombala Railway Station, its metal frame corroded to a deep rust, paint peeled back across the body in long strips. It has not moved in a long time. The yard around it remains largely intact, the footprint of the station essentially unchanged from its original 1920s layout. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of the Goulburn-Bombala branch line and the southernmost point of a network that had taken 37 years to push from Joppa Junction to the Monaro tablelands. NSW Government Railways operated the station throughout its working life. The yard stretched approximately 900 metres and included a 60-foot turntable, a gantry crane, a weighbridge, cattle yards, a goods shed, and a signal box. Locomotive classes 30, 32, and 52 (steam) worked the line, followed by 44 and 48 class diesels and 620 series railmotors from the 1950s onward. Regular steam operations ceased in 1962. The last official passenger train ran in August 1974. The station closed on 26 March 1986, with 3 CPH railmotors making the final visit. The branch line itself officially closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. The station building, a Type 11 pre-cast concrete structure of standard NSWGR design, was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. Heritage NSW assessed it as satisfying the criterion of rarity and described the site as "one of the most intact and well preserved country sites from late in the railways expansion period, c. 1920." The ballast truck in this photograph is part of what remains in that yard. Rust has done what 65 years of railway work did not. Photographed in 2016.