Coming up the line in the first of this series, we got to Warragul. Let's continue.
Nilma was originally called Bloomfield but in 1909 the name was changed to avoid confusion with Broomfield, on the line from Ballarat to Daylesford.
A flag station was opened in 1885 and the 'proper' station was built soon after that. A flag station is one where the train only stops if it is signalled to do so by someone on the platform, using a red flag or, at night, a lantern. By 1951 the roads, and the nearness of Warragul were such that the station was poorly used and was closed.
Darnum railway station was opened in 1880, shortly after the line was opened, and it was closed in the mid-1900s, perhaps at about the same time as Nilma. Darnum was a more important station than Nilma, with cattle yards (1910) and a daily rail freight of milk for Melbourne. I remember one of the school arithmetic books, perhaps grade six, with questions about the Gippsland 'milk train' timetable.
Yarragon railway station opened on August 1, 1878 as Waterloo. It was renamed Yarragon on December 17, 1883. Waterloo was a 'patriotic naming' after the Duke of Wellington's victory over Napoleon in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, in what is now Belgium. It became Yarragon in 1883. It was never a major station but it did have a siding for track gangs, Trafalgar railway station serves the town of Trafalgar, another of the 'patriotic names' in Victoria. Waterloo was changed to Yarragon but Trafalgar kept the original name.
It opened officially when the line was opened and but it was in use by the contractors before the official date. It was officially opened on August 1, 1878. On May 5, 1884, it was renamed Narracan, and was renamed Trafalgar on June 2 of that year. The first name change, only a few months after Waterloo became Yarragon, so there was a bee in someone's bonnet.
Moe railway station opened on March 1, 1878 when the line was opened. It was one of the several rail junctions on the Gippsland line, with the narrow-gauge Walhalla line coming down from the hills to the north, the Thorpdale line running into the Strzeleckis to the south, and a short line to Yallourn. It also had a passing loop because the track was a single track and 'up' trains inevitably needed to pass 'down' trains.
The line ran through Herne's Oak and it is entirely possible that the passing loop was more in Herne's Oak than in Moe. Herne's Oak does not seem to have been used for passenger traffic. A line into Yallourn left Herne's Oak from 1922 but this replaced by a line from Moe in 1953 because the original track was across brown coal deposits that were to be mined. In 1987 that little line was officially closed, though it hadn't been used since about 1978.
Morwell station opened on the other side of the Haunted Hills on June 1, 1877, so both Morwell and Moe were original stations. They were also termini for a time, with the Moe-Morwell gap being the last part of the line completed (except for the connection west from Oakleigh). Morwell became the junction for the Mirboo North line, which closed on June 24, 1974. The last Mirboo freight train ran into Morwell on June 18, six days before the official closure, but passenger services had ended on September 9, 1968.
Maryvale was not a passenger station, it seems. It was created to serve the timber mills and the paper mill, which finished up as the greatest dispatcher of freight down the line.
Newborough TAFE, Traragon Plaza and the Latrobe Regional Hospital are all recent developments on the train timetable but these are served by buses, as I understand it. Indeed, from Traralgon eastward the buses have almost replaced the trains.
Wurruk, for instance, shows as a station on the current Gippsland line but no train stops at Wurruk. It is served instead by V-line busses. It is not a railway station.
Three trains a day go through to Bairnsdale from Southern Cross. They once ran from the Princes Bridge Station, an eastern extension of Flinders Street and no longer in use.
Loy Yang and Maryvale were not, I think, passenger stations. None of my material shows them on any timetable. I have said before on these pages that there many sidings serving local industries and brining their products to the main line. This includes the Maryvale line, Loy Yang, the Energex briquette siding, among many others.
Flynn is a pretty little station and the station is about all there is there. The station was opened in 1880 and was called Flynn's Creek. It was named Flynn between 1910 and 1920. From 1926 it was unstaffed and it was formally closed in the 1970s when the stations around Victoria were being 'tidied up'. To complicate things further the Post Office was named Flynn's Creek, then on July 1, 1894 it became Flinnstead, changing back to Flynn in 1926, when the station was de-staffed.
Rosedale was, and still is, the next station, where the line crosses the La Trobe and the wide swampy areas south of the river. Rosedale opened on June 1, 1877, when the line was opened. It was in the Morwell-Sale section The station, like the township itself, was named after the wife of the leaseholder of Snakes Ridge, a pastoral run which was taken up in 1842 and was located to the north and south of present day Rosedale
Sale is a station which almost died and was recreated. Sale and Bairnsdale are both revived, though Sale had not quite died.
The Sale station was a dead-end station right in the Sale CBD. In the late 1870s few people thought the line would ever go further, It opened with a gala lunch and dinner on June 1, 1877 when the line was opened.
As Sale grew the station, with its short spur line down to the Port of Sale, the various rail crossings became more and more of a nuisance "in the town of Sale itself, east of Reeves Street". It was a big station, made even more so by the line up to the Stratford Junction. That line came into the station from the west, like the main line, so there was much backing and filling.
On November 12, 1983 the last train ran into the Sale station which was then closed, but only in a sense. It was replaced by a new station opened on December 4 of that year. In 1985 the original rails were taken up, including the spur down to the Sale Wharf. It was big and expensive job, but it was necessary.
In 1995 it became the terminus again, with no trains running east of it – until the partial resurrection of the Bairnsdale station in the 1990s for freight and then on May 3, 2004 for passengers. That is a story for the future.