Station Platform

The platform at Bombala Railway Station runs 88 metres along the up side, concrete-faced with a crushed gravel base. One of the original station seats sits on it now, returned after a period at a council depot. It is a small detail that says something about how people here have held onto the place. The station building behind the platform is a Type 11 pre-cast concrete structure, built in 1921 to a standard design used by NSW Government Railways across regional New South Wales between 1919 and 1932. Roughly 140 of these drop-panel concrete buildings were constructed across the state during that period. The NSW State Heritage Register describes Bombala Railway Station as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. Its significance is not in being original or unique; it is in being intact when so many of its counterparts are gone. The station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of a branch line that had been pushing south from Joppa Junction since 1884. Construction of the Bombala extension was approved in 1915 but suspended during the First World War for lack of funds, leaving the line to sit unfinished for years before it finally reached this point. By the time it arrived, the era of railway expansion in New South Wales was effectively over. Bombala Railway Station is one of the last rural branch line termini to open in the state. The station closed on 26 March 1986. The last visit was 3 CPH railmotors. The branch line itself closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. The precinct was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999. What the 2016 photograph records is a platform that has largely held its form: the concrete face, the crushed gravel base, the panel lines of the Type 11 building behind it, and a seat that made its way back after decades away. The yard around it remains essentially intact against its original 1920s layout, maintained by volunteers through the Friends of Bombala Railway. It is the end of the line in every sense, preserved by the effort of people who saw value in keeping it that way.