Character of isolated railways network on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula preserved at museum, workshops
Port Lincoln Railway Museum in the city's former railway station features images capturing the character of the 20th Century railways network of South Australia's Eyre Peninsula.
Images courtesy Eyre Peninsula Railway Preservation Society
The history and character of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula railways, always isolated from the rest of the national network, were preserved in state-heritage-listed Port Lincoln Railway Museum and locomotive depot and workshops.
The museum was opened in 1999 by the peninsula’s small but dedicated railway preservation society, on the ground floor of the stone Port Lincoln Railway Station building and a nearby freight shed (opened in 2004) for larger items. The museum had a huge array of memorabilia from the South Australian Railways and Australian National railway operations days on Eyre Peninsula. The archives included photographs, documents, hand-written registers and journals, and a large collection of drawings dating back to 1905.
The museum captured the peninsula character created by more than 60 years of rail services as the lifeline linked inland areas to Port Lincoln and the rest of the world; when the railway timetable was based around connections with shipping to and from Port Adelaide. Port Lincoln’s locomotive depot and workshops, state heritage listed in 2020, kept Eyre Peninsula’s railways operating since the mid 1920s.
The buildings and turntable were constructed between 1927 and 1932 to ensure trains could continuously transport the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain grown across Eyre Peninsula’s 600 kilometres of lines to the ports. At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, about 600 were employed on the railways in Port Lincoln, by far the biggest local employer.
Agriculture company Viterra ended rail transport in 2019 and moved all grain by truck. The last railway run between Cummins and Port Lincoln was on May 31, 2019. Genesee Wyoming Australia – later called One Rail Australia, continued to lease the locomotive depot and workshops in Port Lincoln and kept them in working order. The company used the site to maintain road transport hopper wagons that carried iron ore in Whyalla and gypsum in Ceduna,
In 2019, a locomotive 850 and bulk grain hopper, was given to the Port Lincoln Railway Museum by Genesee and Wyoming Australia. The 850 locomotive, built in Adelaide specifically for Eyre Peninsula in 1962, was the first diesel-electric locomotive on the peninsula and the first narrow gauge diesel-electric on South Australian railways.
After its entire life hauling grain, gypsum and general freight trains on Eyre Peninsula as far west as Penong and as far north as Buckleboo, it was one of the locos for the final grain train into Port Lincoln.
The Port Lincoln depot and workshops were built by South Australian Railways and their roundhouse was one of only two surviving examples of its kind in the state. The other was at Steamtown in Peterborough. The Port Lincoln roadhouse, workshop and turntable combination also was rare. Their heritage listing delighted Port Lincoln railway historian and president of the Eyre Peninsula Railway Preservation Society Peter Knife, formerly of Sydney, and Adelaide resident Mark Wilson who nominated the site.
