Let’s get this clear from the start. This is not a post about plants. Well, not directly. Places that are named after plants and their study. More specifically, the trains that visit them.
No passenger trains do. Not regular ones, anyway. But today is an irregular day.
On the October long weekend, the Transport Heritage Expo is held at Sydney’s Central Station. Along with static displays of trains, they run a variety of rides on heritage trains and buses. I book a couple of journeys to locations normally inaccessible to passengers.
The first of these is a trip to the old North Sydney Station at Lavender Bay on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour. I’m doing this first journey alone, the others will join me later.
The feeling of waking up too early on a public holiday is compounded by the arrival of daylight savings time the previous morning. I drive to Padstow and board a train to Central Station.
There are a few photo props inside the ornate main arrivals hall of Central Station, but the real action sits on the platforms outside.
There is a green and yellow 42 Class diesel with a line of silver Southern Aurora carriages behind it. The dining car is open for high tea, but unfortunately the sleepers’ shutters are closed. It was in a Southern Aurora sleeper compartment, riddled with a pandemic flu, that I made my first visit to Sydney.
Opposite, a 48 class diesel hauling a single XPT first class carriage and driving engine into which you can queue for a look.
Behind the Southern Aurora is the CPH rail motor that we took a ride on to explore the freight yards of Chullora a few years ago during another Rail Heritage Expo. A brown with yellow highlights 620/720 rail motor from the Hunter Region is running rides down to Waterfall and the Royal National Park today.
Across on platform one is a Pacific National locomotive with a single container car, offering driver’s cabin inspections, followed by a push-me-pull-you configuration of twin 42 class diesels hauling heritage passenger carriages on the Botany freight line. I will be catching this later.
My train arrives on platform 4. It feels like nothing special, a four car silver non-airconditioned commuter S set of the type I used to dread catching on a hot Sydney day. But this trip is about the railway line, not the train.
Central Station is divided into three sections (actually more than that, but it’ll do for now). Platforms 16 to 25 are regular commuter train platforms where the trains go on to pass through Town Hall Station. There’s a gap now filled by the Metro, then platforms 1 to 12 are intercity services that terminate at Central.
Our Lavender Bay bound train needs to head north through Town Hall and across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But it can’t because it’s at a terminating line.
The solution is to head southwest to Ashfield and change lines there. One of the great problems with Sydney Trains’ network is that so many lines are interconnected, so a failure at one point can have repercussions across multiple lines. Here, however, it is a useful feature.
The route through Redfern, past MacDonaldtown, Newton and all the way to Ashfield is very familiar to my commutes to Epping over many years. It certainly brings back a few memories.
At Ashfield we stop and reverse direction, heading back the way we came, but on a different track and this time passing through the suburban platforms on Central Station. We pass some heritage steam train runs heading south.
Our wavy haired carriage attendant from Historical Electric Traction (HET) keeps us updated and shares information about the service and our destination. While HET have organised the event and are staffing the passenger cabins, the S set is still owned and operated by Sydney Trains.
Through the tunnel stations of Town Hall and Wynyard we go without stopping, a rare event according to our guide, then out and across the giant Sydney Harbour Bridge. Looking north towards Luna Park, down near the shore, we can see our destination.
After the bridge comes Milsons Point, then the current North Sydney station, a characterless tunnel beneath the high rises of a second financial district. Out into the light again we reach Waverton Station. Here we are diverted off the main line to a shunting spur, where we stop.
The driver and guard change ends, the train reverses and we begin our descent towards the Harbour.
First comes some stunning views of Berrys Bay and Balls Head. There are jetties and boat maintenance facilities and parked in the bay is the magnificent old steam ferry, the South Steyne, which is under a very long restoration process. Then we cross Blues Point and run around the end of Lavender Bay with the Harbour Bridge and the skyscrapers of the CBD in full view across the harbour. It would be difficult to find a more scenic spot along the whole Sydney railway network.
We stop at the yards just before Luna Park. Before the Harbour Bridge was completed, this was the site of North Sydney station, where passengers would change for ferries to cross to the southern side of the harbour. Now it is just used to store four train sets during weekdays.
It is sad that this magnificent short line remains off-limits for most. It would make for a very scenic short shuttle ride (take the Blue Line in Busan, for example). Unfortunately, the use of the spur is a manual operation, requiring crew to get out and change the points. The local residents, famously noisy whingers in a city full of them, are also opposed.
After a brief stop at Old North Sydney Station, we return up the line to Waverton, the crew swap ends and we head back across the bridge to Central. Like too many older folk these days, the elderly lady decides to listen to some short videos out loud, very loud, on her phone. It sounds like it’s Donald Trump speaking too. Ugh. Removing the earphone plugs from phones was mistake.
This time we stop at platform 16, a through platform, so there is no need for us to go all the way to Ashfield. We leave the train and I swap platforms to catch one to Town Hall, where I will meet B and Alex for lunch.
After meeting them and a meal of my new favourite dish, khao soi, we return to Central for the next train ride. There’s a railway bridge over the train tracks just prior to Sydenham station when heading north. No passenger trains traverse it, the line is strictly freight only to the industries and container port of Botany north and east of Sydney Airport. And when we drive along that route we often see a cargo train passing along it.
So I seized the opportunity presented by the expo for a passenger train ride along the route. Hauled by a 42 class diesel locomotive at each end, owned by the strangely named “Chum Railways”, are four brown and cream metal heritage passenger carriages, each with pairs of seats facing each other. Although it is booked out, there is enough space so that groups of three like us do not need to share seats.
Despite the silver-grey sky outside, it’s hot and there is no air-conditioning or functioning fans inside the carriage, only windows that can be opened. We are the first to board our carriage and ask the attendant which side has the best views. Unfortunately he directs us to the wrong side, as we will discover later.
The trip is originally scheduled to last two hours, but the day before I receive an email saying that it has been extended to three. The reason becomes obvious when you follow the route on a map.
Botany Bay is quite close to the Central Station as the crow flies, but the railway network from Central is designed for passengers, not freight, which takes very different routes from the north. So off we head the same way as earlier in the day, out on the T3 western line, this time past Ashfield and all the way to Lidcombe. The engine chugs along noisily and we enjoy the rush of wind through the open windows, though it is not enough.
Just prior to Lidcombe is the northern edge of Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney’s largest, and a postcode all to itself. The new Muslim section of the cemetery already looks to be filling, with many shiny black marble headstones in rows.
Just after Lidcombe, the line swings south to Berala and Regents Park, but instead of following the short T6 line to Bankstown, we swing east on the freight only line to the yards at Chullora, now passing along the southern edge of the cemetery. In the yards I spot discarded S sets like the one I rode in the morning.
The line swings south again into the large Enfield Yards of Pacific National. This is a major intermodal distribution centre.
We rejoin the path of the commuter lines and turn east just before Campsie. But now this is a dedicated freight line with the adjacent commuter tracks still in the process of an automated metro conversion.
Continuing eastward, we cross a very smelly Cooks River, past Canterbury and Dulwich Hill, where we pass over the terminus of a tram line that started at Central and was once a freight line itself. So far, the route we have taken corresponds with that Tin Hare ride of the last Transport Heritage Expo we attended in 2022, only in reverse. This time we don’t go alongside the big XPT Service Centre shed and head back north.
Instead we cross The Bridge. There is Sydenham and below us is the train line south that B and Alex caught to reach the city. Now we are in uncharted territory!
The landscape is somewhat familiar, as we often drive this route. There is the IKEA to the south, the new concrete spaghetti of motorways and overpasses, the airport parking lot. Aircraft roar overhead as we follow the boundary of the airport, though it is on the wrong side of the train to us.
We pass beside the Stamford Hotel, a favourite of ours for the early morning Jetstar flights before heading off to Japan. Now we were looking up at the rooms we used to pick, facing both the airport and the railway.
The track swings inland, past a golf course, its sandy base giving it a very coastal appearance. There is suburbia, parkland, then industry. The rusting skeletons of chimneys, pipes and distillation towers of the old Broadmeadows fuel refinery have their own stark beauty, speaking of an industry that is fast vanishing from this continent. Factories and materials not replaced, but displaced. The next sight is that of colourful walls of containers, filled with products made in other lands, often returning empty because we make so little here now.
Another train rolls past as we come to a stop. A locomotive sits in the yard, SWIFT written on its side, and we joke that there is no escape from Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album. I don’t think it is just the public holiday, but this area seems so empty of people aside from the odd car or crane. It is a place for big machines, not humans. And yet I find a kind of attractiveness in this emptiness.
Our path back to Central returns us along the same route we took to get here. I go to the end of the carriage, where the top half of the door is opened to the air, to view and photograph the opposite side of the scenery to our seats. The big tanks of fuel storage, the silos of the Kelloggs (Kellanova) cereal plant, a space technology office hidden in modern office buildings.
Across Southern Cross Drive and there is a stunning view of Sydney Airport’s East-West runway, of a Qantas 787 taking off in the distance to the south, then the private jet base. I can smell the KFC and McDonalds cooking, the Krispy Kreme doughnut outlet as we pass, remember a couple of stays at the awful Ibis Budget.
Around the bend and we can see the Qantas hangers, the Dash-8s, their A330 freighters. The train stops for a while near the end of the main runway. I watch a couple of 737s land, international wide bodies position themselves on the runway ready to travel to other lands and I feel that sense of longing again.
Then we start again, cross the polluted Alexandra Canal, pass by the IKEA store and cross the passenger tracks once more. I leave my spot at the end of the carriage and rejoin the others at my seat.
The cold front has arrived now and the air is much cooler now, the sky grey and turbulent. Another elderly passenger is talking loudly and I am starting to get a headache. My phone batteries are getting flat now, so I take fewer photographs on the way back, just look out at the scenery. Some of these areas could not be classed as attractive suburbs, but they are places to live and work.
The Transport Heritage Expo displays are being packed away by the time we return to the platform at Central, three and a quarter hours later in Central. Next year marks a century of electric railways in Sydney, which promises to be a big event and something to be appreciated. When I arrive home I calculate that I have caught seven trains during the day, six of them using that network.
It has been a long day, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity to see a couple of parts of Sydney that we wouldn’t normally have access to and see the city in a fresh new way.