Other little places along the line

Allan Light, who knows a fair bit about the place, wondered why I hadn’t included the other ‘railway towns’ along the South Gippsland line in my recent story about the places names along the South Gippsland railway. I’m always open to suggestions, so I’ll try to get all this right, mate, but it is hard to be certain at times.

I had stuck to the main South Gippsland line a few weeks ago, so these other dots on the map are on the branch lines running off it once upon a time.

The Koo Wee Rup to Strzelecki line was built in 1922 running across the southeast corner of the Great Swamp and then sharply up not the hills.

Koo Wee Rup first appears, so far as I know, in a report in 1847 by a government surveyor. The site we now call Koo Wee Rup was also known as Yallock for a time but the original name recovered. It is said to mean “blackfish swimming”. Remember that the Koo Wee Rup Swamp, aka the Great Swamp, was once a vast swamp, often a lake many miles across but filled with ti-tree in a very dense barrier.

Bayles station was opened in 1922 and was named after Frederick Bayles. Bayles was a railways employee who was killed in the Great War.

Catani was quite properly named after Carlo Catani, the visionary government engineer who drew up the first serious plan for the draining of the Great Swamp. This was in 1880. He also gave his name to Lake Catani, up near Mount Buffalo.

Yannathan, where the line starts to climb, is an Aboriginal word which Blake tells us means “to walk about” and was in use in the 1890s. The meaning is a little strange for a railway station where one stopped, or started walking, but the settlement was there before the station.

Heath Hill seems to have been a more or less descriptive name which became official in 1883 when the Heath Hill Post Office was named. It is 47 feet higher than Yannathan and that is more than enough for a ‘hill’ down there on the Swamp. I’m surprised it wasn’t called Heath Mountain.

Athlone is a town in Ireland which straddles the border between the counties of Westmeath and Roscommon and it is highly likely that the Irish connection is the source of the name, though I don’t know why it was chosen. The place was called Lindemann’s until the Post Office was opened in 1912 and the name Athlone was officially bestowed upon it. It was a stop for the coaches that ran down from Drouin to Korumburra, too.

Topiram is where the line crosses the Lang Lang River and the really steep country gets old of it. The tracks climbed over 600 feet in just over five miles, or call it 212 metres in a little over eight kilometres. Yes, I did use a calculator, but that is close to the limits for railway inclines.

There is a very similar Aboriginal word meaning “star” but I can’t find anything definitive (yet). Though the railway officially used the name Topiram, it is more or less part of Hallora. It was called Longwarry East for a while, too, but you would not want to set out from Longwarry on foot to walk there…

Triholm was the end of the line from 1930 to 1941. In 1930 a bridge on the Strzelecki side became unstable and it was not worth fixing. In 1941 the Lang Lang flooded and damaged one of the four bridges that crossed it, so the line then ended at Yannathan. Blake says the name was interchangeable for Poowong East and suggests the name might come from an old English word, “holm”, for a river flat. I have no more than that to offer – if you can help, please let me know the source.

Mind you, the meaning is no more important that the source, and the source was quite certainly the homestead of Niels Peter Olsen, a Dane who came to Poowong East in the late 1870s and called their selection “Triholm”. They were part of an influx of Danes to the area, which led to Poowong East being called Little Denmark at times. Niels became a pillar of the community and stations were often enough named after prominent local settlers.

Strzelecki was opened in 1922 and closed in 1930. It was the terminus, at the top of the line, which would have pleased the somewhat conceited Polish adventurer and sometime-explorer Count Paul Edmund de Strzelecki, after whom the range was named, and then the station and the little settlement.

I’m not sure that Strzelecki was on the original route of McDonalds Track, though it would have been close. The line was called the Koo Wee Rup-McDonalds Track line until Strzelecki was developed, which might explain why I don’t see it on the relevant maps.

By the bye, Strzelecki had the only locomotive turntable on the line and when it closed locomotives had to run tender-first one way. It was not such a hardship as the sand ballast under the sleepers led to a 40 km/h speed limit.

The Plowrights and Water Washed Sand companies established sidings between Koo Wee Rup and Bayles mining gravel laid down by the Bunyip River over many years. They used small tramlines to bring the sand from the Main Drain. Moving heavy cargoes quickly was what the railways did best back then.

There were also quite a few gemstones in the sand, not of high quality and mostly topaz, I believe. These two quite significant sidings were closed in 1931, beaten by road transport and the Great Depression. There was another significant siding at Athlone for a quarry there. This was opened when the line came through but lasted only three years or so.

The line closed down in stages. Until 1930 Strzelecki was the terminus, then until 1941 that was Triholm. In 1941 the Yannathan to Triholm section was closed and Yannathan became the terminus, losing that impressive title in 1950 when the Yannathan-Bayles section was closed. The Bayles Butter Factory was almost the only reason that last little bit of this short-lived line stayed open, but only until 1959.

Now, sometimes I ask for your help. This is one of those times. Ross Rail Video is on a mission to collect and preserve as much as possible in the way or railway pictures from Gippsland’s past, black and white, colour, still, Super-8 (remember that) or any other moving pictures, even video. Everything will be looked after carefully, copied and returned to you.

Even if you have only one or two old railway photos in an old album somewhere Phillip Ross and I can learn from it, copy it and so preserve it forever – and then get it straight back to you. Try Phillip at pross25@tpg.com.au or me on john.wells8@bigpond.com