Ballast End Truck

In the yard at Bombala Railway Station, a ballast truck sits where it was left, its steel frame rusted through and paint peeling back to bare metal. Grass and low vegetation have grown up around the wheels and along the rail line, reclaiming the ground by degrees. The truck is no longer going anywhere. Neither is the line. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of a branch that had taken 37 years to push south from Joppa Junction. The Goulburn-Bombala line reached Cooma in 1889, Nimmitabel in 1912, and finally Bombala in 1921, the last significant extension of NSW's railway expansion era arriving just as that era was closing. The station building is a Type 11 pre-cast concrete structure, one of approximately 140 built across regional NSW between 1919 and 1932 under a standardised NSWGR design. Heritage NSW has described it as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. The yard itself stretches approximately 900 metres. Within it: a 60-foot turntable, a gantry crane opposite the main platform, a weighbridge hut, a signal box with a skillion roof, a corrugated iron goods shed, loading bank, and stock siding. Locomotive classes 30, 32, and 52 (steam) and 44 and 48 class diesel locomotives worked the line at various points, along with 620 series diesel 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, the final visit a set of 3 CPH railmotors. The branch line itself was officially closed in May 1989, after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. The site was added to the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. The Friends of Bombala Railway now maintain the precinct through volunteer effort. The ballast truck remains in the yard, part of a station described by Heritage NSW as one of the most intact country railway sites from the c. 1920 expansion period. Photographed in 2016.