Australian Capital Territory Railway

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Canberra train station

The Australian Capital Territory Railway is a railway line that connects the Australian capital Canberra with the railroad in New South Wales .

route

The railway line is about eight kilometers long and running in standard gauge , as is the neighboring railway in New South Wales , where it joins in Queanbeyan . After the founding of the Australian Confederation in 1913, Canberra was laid out as the capital and planned city in an area that was legally separated from the state of New South Wales and organized directly at the federal level. Since it is so legally outside of New South Wales, the railway connection should also be created legally independent of New South Wales. This happened in 1914 under the legal ownership of the Commonwealth Railways , the former federal railway. The line was built on their behalf by the Ministry of Public Works of the State of New South Wales and opened on May 25, 1914 for freight traffic.

Operation on this relatively short branch line was and is in the hands of the New South Wales Railway. This is currently the Rail Corporation New South Wales . As a successor to Commonwealth Railways, the owner of the railway infrastructure was initially the Australian National , now the Australian Rail Track Corporation .

railway station

Canberra reception building

The infrastructure of the route also includes Canberra station , a terminus station and the only station in the entire area of ​​the capital of Australia. According to Walter Burley Griffin's original concept , Canberra should have had three train stations, one in the north, one in the east and one in the south. But it stayed at the "Nordbahnhof"; the other stations were never built.

When the federal parliament moved to Canberra in 1927, rail connections to the new capital were improved and sleeper connections to Sydney and Albury (and from there to Melbourne ) were created. In 1966 the original station building was replaced by a new one.

literature

  • CC Singleton: Railways in the Australian Capital Territory . In: Australian Railway Historical Society Bulletin (November 1967), pp. 244-252.
  • Canberra's Engineering Heritage, 2nd edition, Chapter 2 by Walter M Shellshear .
  • John Cain: Short History of Railways in Canberra. 1993