Rails

The narrow-gauge rails in this photograph are part of 6.7 kilometres of track that threaded through Newington Armament Depot and Nature Reserve, connecting the Parramatta River wharf to the magazines, laboratories, and storage buildings spread across the site. The gauge is 610 mm, two feet wide, the same measurement recorded in a 1928 survey of the depot when rolling stock comprised 4 cartridge trucks and 6 shell trucks. By the time the Royal Australian Navy vacated in December 1999, that number had grown to 7 battery-powered locomotives and 30 rail wagons. The locomotives ran on 60 volts DC. No spark risk. Everything about the railway was designed around the possibility of accidental detonation. The depot was established in 1897 on land resumed by the NSW colonial government in 1882 for the storage of gunpowder and other explosives. Management transferred from the Commonwealth Military Forces to the Royal Australian Navy on 22 July 1921, and the site expanded substantially through the 1920s and 1930s as naval requirements grew. By 1950 the depot covered approximately 259 hectares. During the Second World War, Australian, British, and United States Navy operations ran simultaneously across four separate precincts, with 5,127 ship dockings serviced through the site. The last ammunition operation over the wharf took place on 14 December 1999. The Navy vacated that month. The site was handed to the NSW State Government in January 2000, and a 2001 stabilisation programme preserved the buildings and the railway infrastructure. The track visible here had already been extended post-2001 to form a visitor loop around the forest. By 2019, when this photograph was made, the bush was doing what bush does when no one is maintaining the edges. The rails remain. The corridor they once kept clear has largely closed over.