Sydney's Transport Revolution
Introduction
The Sydney Harbour Bridge was declared open on 19 March 1932. Until that event the large population of the North Shore, so close to the city yet separated by a wide water barrier, used a large fleet of ferries to cross from the railway terminus at Milsons Point and tram services which extended to several wharves including McMahons Point. Ferries of more than twice the capacity of the modern Manly Freshwater class boats shuttled back and forth all day with passengers while vehicular ferries carried cars and horse-drawn vehicles.
The huge structure and its road and rail approaches took at least ten years to build. Tenders for the main span and its immediate approaches were invited by the NSW government on 30 September 1921. In fact, the bridge specified at that time was not the steel arch bridge which opened ten years later but rather a cantilever steel truss bridge. Although there had been other suggestions for a harbour crossing, sometimes at different locations and sometimes by tunnel, these had always come to naught. It is not unreasonable therefore to take the 1921 date as the beginning, for the chain of events commenced in late 1921 proceeded uninterrupted until the bridge was complete.
In 1922 Chief Engineer, John Bradfield, visited likely tenderers in Europe and America and learned that they would be willing to tender to span the harbour with an arch as an alternative to the specified cantilever and upon his return to Sydney withdrew the 1921 plans and issued new documents including the option of an arch. Ultimately the tender which he judged to be the best was an arch design and it was the bridge that was built.
But the bridge across the harbour was just one component of a massive overhaul of transport in Sydney which Bradfield accomplished in the decade between 1922 and 1932. The bridge was to carry four railway lines, and these had to be brought under the city from the distant Sydney Terminal (Central) station at the other end of the central business district, and connected over the bridge, with the existing North Shore railway at Waverton, after it had passed through and under North Sydney. And the bridge had to be high enough to let ocean-going ships pass beneath it.
The plan to build the railway under the city to the bridge was just one line of four which Bradfield planned and at least partly constructed. There was to be a loop from Sydney Terminal around the city via Circular Quay, and this was mostly built by the time the bridge opened, except for the crossing at Circular Quay. There was to be a line from the eastern suburbs which would, after serving several stations in the city, extend to the western suburbs. There was to be a line from the Northern beaches and Mosman, across the bridge, and through the city on a separate route before extending out to the southern suburbs. While much work was done in the decade under consideration for these, east to west and north to south railways, virtually none of the 1920’s work was ever completed and it remains unused under the city, except for two platforms at Town Hall station which were ultimately used for an Eastern Suburbs Railway by a different route.
Work in earnest began on the City Railway project in February 1922 and one leg of the city loop, to Museum and St James, was opened in late 1926 while the other leg, through Town Hall and Wynyard, and the line to the bridge, opened just before the bridge. On bridge opening-day the trains which had been terminating at Wynyard for three weeks, simply extended their journey across the bridge to Milsons Point and North Sydney.
Strictly, work had begun on the underground railways in 1916. Bradfield had made a fact-finding tour of the world in 1914 and produced his master plan which was accepted by the NSW government and canonised as an Act of Parliament in 1915. Work began in 1916 but was abandoned for lack of funds by 1918. Most of the work done at this time was more of a public nuisance than progress towards anything useful. Large swathes of public parkland, including Belmore Park, Hyde Park and the Botanic Gardens near Government House and the Conservatorium of Music, were alienated with hoardings, dug up and abandoned to flood. The only section of tunnel actually ‘completed’ was a short section under Macquarie Street at the eastern end of the as yet unbuilt Circular Quay viaduct. The tunnel carried a keystone on its arched portal bearing the words ‘City Railway 1918’. Trains did not run through that opening until 1956, but by then the ornamental stone arch had been demolished!
The lines under the city – The City Railway – were but one aspect of Bradfield’s revolution of rail public transport in Sydney in the 1920s. At that time Sydney had one of the most intensively worked steam suburban railway systems in the world, but it was at its limit. The whole network of lines to the then limits of closely settled population, was electrified. This was not just a change of motive power. Most of the cars were of new steel construction, a few were wooden bodied cars on steel underframes recently built ready for conversion in anticipation of electrification and a minority were older steel under-framed cars reworked to fit the new trains. All the cars were built to a new wider structure gauge so as to allow five-abreast seating rather than four-abreast, thus increasing seated capacity by 25%. All the new cars at least had wide double doors at the quarter points of their length to allow rapid loading and unloading.
There was of necessity a large investment in the overhead wiring for the electric power as well as substations and main feeder routes from power stations. Signalling was also extensively replaced to maximise the capacity of the new trains. Alignments were modified through platforms to fit the wide trains while track structure and drainage were improved for better running and efficient conduct of the electric traction currents.
It is well recognised that Bradfield was more than just the engineer who designed some, and managed all, of these tasks. He was the driver of public opinion which demanded these transport improvements from its government. He was also very thorough in documenting the work through photography. Perhaps 4,000 photos exist of the work, nearly all with contemporary captions and almost all with a date inscribed on the negative.
The images of the signal events of the decade’s work have been published many times but the rest, sorted into date order as they easily can be, tell a wonderful story, hopefully of interest to the readers of this website. Watch the railway and the bridge being slowly built over ten years so that in 2026 we can catch a train to St James with an appreciation of how the tunnels reached that place, and in 2032 walk, bicycle or drive across the bridge, and catch a train over it, with the best understanding of how 50,000 tonnes of steel got to be where it will have been for a hundred years.
Bill Phippen is writing or editing a series of articles leading up to the Centenary of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A list of these articles is below:
