Watch For Trains

A faded sign reading "Watch For Trains" stands at the edge of a narrow-gauge railway corridor inside Newington Armament Depot and Nature Reserve, the tracks beside it now largely reclaimed by grass and low scrub. The sign is functional in origin and plain in design, the kind of thing that would have been installed without ceremony and read without much thought by the workers passing it every working day. By 2019, it addresses an audience that is no longer coming. The railway it once warned of ran 6.7 kilometres through the depot at 610 mm gauge, connecting the wharf on the Parramatta River to the magazines, laboratories, and storage buildings spread across the site. Seven battery-powered locomotives, running on 60-volt systems, hauled 30 rail wagons along these lines. The choice of battery drive was deliberate: no combustion, no exhaust, no spark risk near buildings packed with gunpowder, cordite, depth charges, and torpedoes. The depot was established by the NSW Military Forces in 1897 and transferred to the Royal Australian Navy on 22 July 1921, a handover that enabled high explosive ammunition to be moved from Spectacle Island upriver to Newington. The railway was central to that operation, threading between the earth-mounded magazines and along the blast walls that separated one store from the next. At its wartime peak in October 1945, the depot employed 1,141 workers across the RANAD Sydney network. The last ammunition operation over the wharf was conducted on 14 December 1999, and the Navy vacated the depot that same month. The NSW State Government took possession in January 2000. Stabilisation and restoration of the railway began in 2001. The tracks were extended to form a visitor loop, and guided tours ran on Sundays until heritage interpretation activities were suspended in 2024. This photograph, made in 2019, records the sign and the tracks in the interval between active use and uncertain future: the infrastructure still present, the traffic long gone.