A wooden luggage trolley, office chair, desk, typewriter and sign-on book, with the last date of 28 June, 1989, sit exactly where they were left inside Crookwell Railway Station. Sitting in the heritage-listed station, Mick Bindley says interest in heritage rail has never been stronger. Photo: John Thistleton.
In its heyday NSW’s rail network resembled the circulation system of a human.
The main arteries headed north, west and south, and from them branch lines snaked their way to smaller places like Koorawatha and Grenfell in the west and Cooma and Bombala in the south. They enabled trains to haul fertiliser, grain, wool, sheep, fruit and in the case of Crookwell, sacks of potatoes.
A paybus would routinely find its way to the outlying branch lines, said train driver of 44 years, rail researcher and diorama builder Mick Bindley.
“So they would have a safe, a paymaster, a driver and a guard, lots of money on board, and they would pull up where the fettlers would be working and pay them once a fortnight,” Mick said.
Mick is president of the Goulburn Crookwell Railway Heritage, which is leasing and restoring two paybuses at its headquarters at Crookwell.
Next to the old Crookwell railway line and heritage-listed station, which is now a museum, one of the paybuses will stand on a plinth, operating as a coffee shop from early next year. It’s being restored by the ‘Thursday Morning Gang’, a small group of volunteers from Grabben Gullen and Crookwell.
It’s the latest project for the railway heritage group which has about 50 members, and 20 to 25 active ones who come from Cowra, Towrang, Crookwell, Canberra and Engadine, Sydney.
The Sydneysiders are working on the second paybus. “They come down for three or four or five days at a time,” Mick said. “They have just retired. They love being down here, camping out, being bushies, doing voluntary work.”
Once accredited, members plan to run their two- and four-seater rail bikes on almost a kilometre of railway line, with passengers as keen as themselves.
“The goal is to go another two kilometres out of town; they will be towed on a trike and they can pedal back,” Mick said. The longer-term goal is to reach McAlister, another settlement along the line where local people are keen to reinstate their station and platform.
“Rail history is going gangbusters,” Mick said.
He began his rail adventures as many of his peers did in their childhood with Hornby and Lima model trains and progressed to bigger, old and new rolling stock.
“I am railway blood,” he said. “My great uncle was a railway man in Armidale in the early 1900s; he was a steam train driver at Armidale.
“Dad (Stan Bindley) worked at the Government Printing office and on the buses, and me, I always loved trains and trucks,” he said.
Mick Bindley’s detailed diorama of Towrang Railway Station appearing how it would have in 1977. Photo: Mick Bindley.
When his parents left Sydney to retire in Cooma, he became involved in Cooma Monaro Heritage Rail. In earlier years he joined his rail colleagues at Eveleigh in Sydney as a model train hobbyist.
“We built different layouts on the exhibition circuit over the years, and exhibited at Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne,” he said.
He began working on the railway in 1981 at Eveleigh as a junior roster clerk before progressing to the running sheds on diesel locomotive, became a class one fireman, then worked on passenger and goods trains. In 1986 he switched to driving electric trains at Mortdale, then Cronulla and later Waterfall.
While teaching young recruits for six years, he met his wife, Kimberly, who joined the railway as a guard with Sydney Trains.
Living in Sydney, and having bought a weekender at Towrang, a small village on the main southern line east of Goulburn, Mick and his family wondered each time they visited, why they weren’t living there. “We were commuting down to this great place on the banks of the river, and thought let’s just move,” he said.
They did just that in 2005, and later he started researching Towrang’s rail history, including asking the locals who were living where the railway station was until it was taken away in 1977.
“They had photos, stories like most country people do and you think, ‘Wow, that really happened,’” Mick said. Consequently he built a stationary diorama, including the Railway Institute’s tennis courts, pub, post office and general store. Now it’s a much bigger production in his American barn-style shed.
A rail motor in the 1930s at Crookwell Railway Station. Five train services operated from the station a day, including two passenger services. Photo: Goulburn Crookwell Railway Heritage.
These days he is a passenger train driver for Sydney Trains based at Moss Vale and doing the Goulburn-Campbelltown and Goulburn-Sydney services every day.
Like-minded mates bring their models and talk about trains and their families. They’re joined by Kimberly and various children home from school.
“The railway is like a family. Once you are in, it is in your blood,” Mick said.
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