Volunteer

The platform at Bombala Railway Station stretches 88 metres along the up side of the yard. In this photograph, made in 2016, a single volunteer moves along it in afternoon light, the faded pre-cast concrete of the Type 11 station building rising behind them. The surface of those panels has thinned and worn over the decades, the joint lines of the drop-panel construction still legible, still recording the method by which this building was put together more than a century ago. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of the Goulburn-Bombala branch line and the end point of a network that had pushed south from Joppa Junction since 1884. It took 37 years for the line to reach the southern Monaro tablelands. The station building is a NSW Government Railways Type 11 standard design, one of approximately 140 pre-cast concrete drop-panel structures built across regional NSW between 1919 and 1932. Heritage NSW has described it as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. The station served the pastoral communities of the region for 65 years, the yard handling wool, beef cattle, superphosphate, and farm machinery. Regular passenger services ended in August 1974. The last train visited on 26 March 1986, three CPH railmotors. The branch line itself closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. What the photograph records is what came after. The Friends of Bombala Railway have maintained the precinct through volunteer effort for well over a decade, keeping the station building, goods shed, signal box, footbridge, and yard infrastructure intact. The site is listed on the NSW State Heritage Register (SHR #01091), gazetted 2 April 1999. The volunteer in the frame is part of that ongoing refusal to let the place disappear. The afternoon light falls on the platform the same way it always has. The building stands.