Upline

The upline at Bombala Railway Station holds rolling stock that was not originally the station's own. The carriages were relocated from the Royalla line in the ACT in 2012, arriving alongside the Esso fuel tanker now parked in the same yard. They came to a place already long out of service, adding new layers of displacement to a terminus that had been quiet for nearly three decades. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the end point of a branch line that had taken 37 years to travel south from Joppa Junction. The Goulburn-Bombala line reached Cooma in 1889, pushed to Nimmitabel in 1912, and finally arrived at Bombala after construction work that had been suspended during the First World War for lack of funds. The total distance from Sydney was 332 miles and 16 chains. The station was built to a Type 11 pre-cast concrete design, a standard NSWGR pattern used across approximately 140 sites in regional NSW between 1919 and 1932. Heritage NSW has since described it as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. The yard ran to approximately 900 metres in length, carrying a turntable, gantry crane, goods shed, signal box, weighbridge, and stock siding. Primary cargo was wool, beef cattle, superphosphate, and farm machinery moving to and from the pastoral communities of the southern Monaro. The station closed on 26 March 1986. The last visit was 3 CPH railmotors. The branch line itself was officially closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. The yard has remained largely intact since, managed by volunteers and listed on the NSW State Heritage Register since 2 April 1999. This photograph was made in 2016. The rolling stock from Royalla stands on the upline, stationary in a yard built for a line that no longer runs.