From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli – 23 October

Recently, I spent time exploring photographs on the website of Lost Melbourne. It was both fascinating and heartbreaking to see what has been lost of us over time.

A MEALTIME picture taken in the Newport Railway Workshop’s refectory, circa 1930, fired my imagination. Myriads of thoughts exploded as I tried to imagine the life stories of the hundreds of men sitting around the tables – all of whom will have left us. In a few years, a number of them would have gone off to fight in the Second World War. Now, some are buried in a foreign field.

The permanent Newport workshops were completed in 1889, and while they still operate today, they are far removed from the prosperous days when they employed 5000 men. The original workshops have been maintained for heritage uses.

In Ballarat, the Phoenix Foundry company was established in 1854 to build mining and other industrial machinery. Over 30-plus years they built, for the Victorian Railways, 352 locomotives of 38 different designs. At its zenith it employed 350 men. In 1871, it built the Governor Weld, the first steam locomotive to operate in Western Australia. The foundry lasted until 1906 when it was driven into voluntary liquidation by Sir Thomas Bent and his Commonwealth Liberal government.

The erstwhile, nationwide, Australian Railway Workshops were at the heart of an engineering revolution which touched and changed our lives, and the world, irrevocably. Given Australia’s tyranny of distance, the railway line network in Australia was remarkable, and imperative. It connected remote communities, transported goods to every corner of our vast land, and allowed us to explore the countryside.

The twice-weekly steam train came into Gwalia station at about 5pm and left the following morning. The town numbered about 400, and many of the women, and most of the children, went to ‘meet the train.’ It was a social gathering – a chance for townsfolk to catch-up – and for the town’s lone policemen to check out any new arrivals. Six times a year, for five years, I took the train to-and-from boarding school. The 24-hour journey has left me with a passion for train travel.

Times have changed. Sadly, in moments of recent political madness and dubious fiscal argument, railway lines have been torn-up, leaving remote towns without a train service.

The loss of the old railway system, and its societal effectiveness, is to be lamented.

Roland can be contacted [email protected].