L Truck Plate

The L truck flat car sitting in the yard at Bombala Railway Station arrived as a donation from the Goulburn Roundhouse. Its steel frame was built with hand-driven rivets, each one a detail of an era before welding became standard practice in rolling stock construction. The open deck carried wool bales, timber, drums, and general freight across the southern Monaro tablelands for decades. It is the kind of equipment that did its work without ceremony and outlasted the railway that employed it. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of a branch line that had taken 37 years to push south from Joppa Junction. The line was built to serve the pastoral communities of the Monaro tablelands, and goods traffic was the backbone of its operation. Primary cargo ran both ways: wool and beef cattle out, superphosphate and machinery in. During the Second World War, petrol rationing made the line the sole reliable supply route for scattered farming communities across the region. The station building is a Type 11 pre-cast concrete structure, one of approximately 140 built across regional NSW between 1919 and 1932, and Heritage NSW has identified it as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. The yard extends approximately 900 metres in length and remains essentially intact against its original 1920s layout: signal box, goods shed, gantry crane, weighbridge hut, turntable pit, loading bank, and stock siding. Goods traffic at Bombala Railway Station closed on 26 March 1986, the last visit made by 3 CPH railmotors. The branch line itself closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. The L truck flat car photographed in 2016 remains in the yard, one piece of rolling stock preserved at a terminus that never became a ruin because the community around it refused to let it.