The Drouin Railway Station

When I started this story I was full of happy memories of the Drouin station. I rode to and from there to Longwarry on the ‘school train’ in the late fifties and early sixties, and I made a few shillings loading and unloading rail trucks with various things, as one does during school holidays.

Instead I found it really hard to get much reliable information so my happiness was strained.

The Drouin Railway Station was going to be about where the cemetery is now, about a mile west. The Warragul station was initially going to be at the Lardners Track crossing, too, but that isn’t really relevant.

The poor tracks and what little settlement there was meant that the railway plans for stations could be fairly flexible in the first few years.

In the end the station was built in the Drouin Junction Town Reserve, which was intended to house the town’s public buildings, on land running east from the railway station and the level crossing. The Police Station, Post Office and, for a time, the Shire Offices, were on this land.

It seems that the site was moved to put it on a higher point so that locomotives could start their trains rolling downhill to get up a little momentum.

It didn’t take much difference in grades to make life difficult for enginemen. There was a half-mile drop for trains heading east from Drouin before the climb onto the ridge between Drouin and Warragul and that was enough. Going back west was easy, there were only two slight uphill grades before the Longwarry Bank dropped the line about 300 feet onto the flats of the Great Swamp.

The result is that Drouin has the highest altitude of any station on the Gippsland line. The highest point on the line is between Drouin and Warragul, 69 feet higher than the Drouin station tracks.Upper Camp (Whiskey Creek Railway Camp) and Lower Camp for railway construction

In July 1878 Drouin Junction became Drouin.

Drouin was important for the timber trade, which didn’t last all that long but was vital while the forests were being pushed back. Mike officially

McCarthy wrote of the little tramlines bringing firewood and palings and such into the Drouin station. There was a siding north of the railway station parallel to one of the tramlines for easy loading. Two other tramlines came in on the south side.

There was a single track through the station, with two goods sidings on the south side, which extended under the bridge to a second goods platform and the crane on the Warragul side of the bridge.

Now there are only two through tracks and no sidings at the station. Goods are moved by road now, with more convenience but much greater cost in many ways.

Graeme Butler’s meticulous 1979 book on the Shire of Buln Buln tells us a little about the station buildings. The original, permanent, timber building was built by N. Irwins in 1881. There was a more primitive temporary hut-cum-shed on the platform before this. “Beside it, to the west, he built the usual little lamp-room, with an attached double earth-closet for the ladies…another little cottage was put up on the platform by S.S. Leonard in 1888.”

Butler tells us that the original building had broad verandahs, and that it included the Station Master’s residence. This residence was strung out along one side of a “long passage which separated the living quarters from the various ‘Ladies’ Waiting Room’, ‘General Waiting Room’ and office.

We forget that Drouin was an important junction where the Buln Buln Road and the Western Port Road crossed. There were many settlers to the south, particularly, who really did need that station to make their farms viable.

We’ve talked before about the way the line was built in segments. Noonan Brothers built the section from Bunyip to Morwell, and thus through Drouin, and had it ready for traffic on 1 December 1877. The grand opening of the whole line, at least from Oakleigh to Sale, was on 7 March 1878, with a trainload of VPs taking five sooty hours to make the journey. People gathered along the way to cheer and wave.

The timetable was not a busy one. Two trains a day ran each way. At 10.20am the OakleighSale train pulled in from the west, and the ‘night train’ arrived in Drouin at 7.00pm. I don’t know when the westbound return trips went through Drouin but as Drouin is close enough to the mid-point of the route, timewise, they perhaps crossed at Warragul (remember, it was single-track) and would have passed through Drouin soon after the eastbound trains went through. For the moment, that is mere supposition.

A picture from about 1908 shows the bridge at the east end of the station, with three tracks between the station and the first goods platform with its large arch-roofed goods shed. That goods shed was built in 1878. The tracks go under the bridge to a goods yard with the old white, three-legged timber crane once familiar everywhere.

Another photo from 1908 shows Currie’s eight-bullock team in the goods yard, apparently loading sacks of something into an I-class goods wagon, standard normal-height rail trucks, open goods trucks, if you like. These were the utility trucks of the line and they had sections in the side which opened up allow easy loading and unloading from wagons (I can tell you from experience that the ‘easy’ does not apply to unloading wire-baled lucerne which had had a few hundred miles to pack down into the trucks.).

The iron-girdered bridge was built in 1884 by A. Clutts and I’ve sometimes wondered why the Oak Street crossing was not made the main road – to get high enough to allow the trains a safe clearance meant the Main South Road took a very steep climb up from the Main Street. This crossing ran from the road around the Memorial Park, across the tracks and up what is now Porter Place and into Oak Street. Perhaps it was thought that bringing the Main South Road (Western Port Road) into Drouin directly was better.

In the late 1930s the main street was widened.

At this time the level crossing that led into Oak Street was still in use. It was certainly shown in the Grades Book for the VR in 1927. A 1944 aerial photograph clearly shows it operating. That same photograph shows us many things, including the old Presbyterian Church , the old Butter Factory, the road/ramp down into the goods yard from Oak Street – and its five-way junction - and a huge amount of vacant land along the south side of the main street.

I am told, and have written before, that the “Hope Street” level crossing was closed when the line was duplicated in the 1950s and yet that 1944 photographs clearly shows two tracks running through the crossing. I can’t explain this – or many other things – because I can remember the duplication of the line up from Longwarry when I was a little bloke walking the line to school, and that was in the early 1950s.