We arose next morning and instead of continuing our journey to Darwin, we went back along the road we had travelled last evening and took the turn for the ‘historic station of Serviceton.’
Tom Waits brought us here with his brilliant evocation of the decline of a ‘small Victorian town’ where the trains stopped less and less often because of the ‘fancy buffet cars and faster locomotives’, but what we were to find here was even more fascinating.
There is nothing at Serviceton that we would naturally call a town. There are a few scattered dwellings, some derelict. Then there is this beautiful old train station, clearly disused, but far from derelict. We even thought that someone may be living there, with plant pots at the doors and curtains on some windows.
The plaque out front gave a rather drier account than Tom Waits had, but we took it to hint that it would be fine to venture through the entrance and onto the platform. I just had to get a picture of the station, but it truly was a long low station building and it was going to be hard.
I set off across the rail track remembering the time when even back home as kids we could find ourselves right beside a railway track, even put a halfpenny on it to see what happened to it. I had to walk a little way further into the bush to get the whole station in the frame, but with my back to the adjoining fence I finally got it. Then I looked up and saw Vanessa with an old man (no not me!). I already felt I had ‘trespassed’, by crossing the track, but had we also intruded.
Our old friend turned out to be one of the local community who had undertaken to care for this site of historic interest and had already offered Vanessa to unlock and show us around and so we learned the real story of the station at Serviceton. Really, this station never served Serviston, not in the traditional sense, rather Serviston, the town was there to serve the trains.
Instead of the handfull of homesteads we saw today, Serviceton had grown into a bustling ‘town’ in those days when the separate ‘colonies’ of Australia operated completely independently with customs at the borders, different rail gauges and crews only allowed to work within their own state.
We were shown through all the rooms of the station. It’s two separate ticket offices where north and southbound passengers had to get off and buy a new ticket for the second half of their journey, but only after they had passed through the respective customs offices. There was a Post Office and a grand refreshments room that served full meals and drinks twenty-four hours a day. They would then board a new train of a different gauge with different guards drivers and ancillary personel to continue that journey between Melbourne and Adelaide.
Even although Tom Waits hadn’t really captured the full history of this station, it was his evocation that brought us to this fascinating discovery of the history of the Australian ‘colonies’ and not just their railways.
