Canberra Railway Museum Early Development

Photos of the Canberra Railway Museum Early Development can be found here.

Following the delivery of Garratt 6029 in January 1975, member Alan Salisbury entered into negotiations with the Commonwealth Railways for an area of land for storage of heritage trains. The area selected is the area now used, excluding the area of the former Canberra railway yard which was leased at a later date.

The site originally offered was cut off at the northern end of the existing platform. There’s a shallow 6-inch water main crossing here.

Col Fuller surveyed the site and worked out it was significantly smaller than the drawing showed, so we went back to the Commonwealth Railways, to secure the remainder of the block. The final site plan was surveyed in February 1981.

Wal Shellshear had drawn up a plan with a two-track shed the length of 6029 placed at an angle more or less to the western side of the current carriage shed. The rate at which locos and carriages were being acquired suggested this would be well short of the requirements.

I got involved at this stage and looked at what could be shoehorned in.

Step one was to identify the longest straight space available for a carriage shed, which was along the eastern boundary of the site.

Step two was to locate loco as far away as possible from housing. Thirlmere had been hit with a curfew because of noise.

The large space adjacent to the carriage shed is for a workshop. The ACT Chief Minister offered $400k around 1995, but, for various reasons, this didn’t proceed.

One of the advantages of the site is that it is plastered with services, water, drainage and sewer!

I attempted to establish a railway atmosphere by providing a station building and platform at the site entrance. The entrance hid the industrial nature of the site and provided an opportunity for landscaping. The platform took advantage of site landfall. At the time, the prospect of running trains on the mainline looked poor, so a couple of us looked at the option of building a railway out towards the lake. Over the years, quite a few people have noted that this is in fact Canberra’s original station.

The railway yard has a fall of 1 in 200, to assist gravity shunting and I decided that the yard would be flat for safety.  I worked out the earthworks and drainage, pegged out the site with my trusty dumpy, and arranged a contractor to do the work. $5,000 was really well spent. The site is really well drained, and the tracks are level.

Rod Driver of the Tradesmen’s Union Club at Dickson arranged for the construction huts from the National Gallery to go to three community groups, 2 Scout groups and the railway museum. They were to be delivered on the morning of Christmas Eve 1981. The two buildings provided to Scout groups were destroyed by fire by vandals at 3 pm and 6 pm that day. The front fence was cut down to get the building in location at the railway museum.  At that stage, earthwork had been done, but the final track plan wasn’t set, so I took a guess at where to place the building.  It’s a shame the other half of the hut, which went to the Scouts, didn’t end up at the railway museum as well. The front fence was put back up temporarily. I see it’s recently been replaced.

Alan Sewell prepared the plans to renovate the building. One end wall was missing. The loos were added as well as verandahs.

Funding was secured, primarily through unemployment relief schemes, for development works, tidying up the building, and construction of the ashpit, providing all underground services, plumbing, drainage and electrical and the platform, under an unemployment relief scheme, which included funds for materials. Bill Gore, a very capable builder, was employed as supervisor.

Commonwealth Railways made available all the odd lengths of rail which were stored in Canberra yard. This was sufficient for all tracks, including points, except for Vee crossings. We obtained these from Queanbeyan and Cowra, a trailer on the back of my car.

With the parts we had, the five sets of points were built, and are to 4 different designs. One of my work colleagues had just purchased a home computer, and the point layouts were calculated on this computer. I measured all the odd lengths of rail and measured and sorted them so that not a single piece of rail needed to be cut!  There are at least 4 different profiles of 80 lb/yard rail used on site.

Design work for the pit and platform face was done by local consulting engineers, Hughes Truman Ludlow, for free. They gave me a basic sketch and I hand drew them, and HTL checked them off.

I designed the plumbing and electrical layouts. Pipes and cables were installed by our work experience participants. Member Damien Sloane connected the electrics.

The next job was stage one of the carriage shed. The model engineers were asked to come on site, encouraged by the ACT Government, and the carriage shed was moved to be 4 metres from the boundary to permit a double track live steam railway.

I asked around and was told the cheapest shed would be from an off the shelf shed.  A contract was let to a major, well known, building materials company. A total fiasco. It was their first and last contract in the ACT. They lost their building licence.

For the second stage, I went to HTL who provided a design. I drew it up, and we got a contractor to supply and erect it.

The carriage shed was supplied with a roof only and volunteers put on the wall cladding, added lights etc, as well as doing the track laying.

The datum for the track was the junction with the Brambles siding, and the rail at the ashpit and in the carriage shed are set at this level. Other tracks are lower as there was never funding for enough ballast! 

Special thanks to Stephen Buck August 2023