50 years around Sydney

Here's another photograph my father took in North Sydney that day (North Sydney station is below street level on the other side of the concrete wall on the left side):



I'm going off topic with this next one, but here's another photograph he took in Chatswood of the shops in Victoria Avenue. It doesn't show up too well in the scan, but on the original slide you can tell where the road has been resurfaced after removal of the tram tracks (the North Sydney and Chatswood lines closed in June of 1958). None of these buildings remain today. The cars are interesting - Morris Minor, Austin A40 Somerset, Humber Hawk and two Holdens:

 

Hi Gary.

It's similar, but not the same. I don't think any of the buildings in that photograph survive today.

The white building you refer to was on the corner of Victoria Ave and Victor St (the street where the Post Office is). As far as I recall, from around 1962 or so, it was an old style variety store, Coles, I think. It was quite possibly one well before that, but my earliest memory of it was in December of 1962, when we stopped there to get some zinc cream and sunglasses prior to a trip to a beach (that was all you needed then as sun protection!). After Coles moved out (I could be wrong here, but I think they moved to a new building on the corner of Victoria Ave and Spring St) the building was converted to a small shopping arcade, which one entry in Victoria Ave and the other in Victor St.

The other building on that corner, nearer the camera was replaced in the early 1960s by a new building (it was rather unusual, with the main shop at street level and another shopping area on a mezzanine level at the back of the store, and housed a Big W or a Woolworths variety store. I might have the dates and sequence of events a bit wrong here, but I think it went like this - the store opened as a Big W (one of the first), then Woolworths closed their original variety store near the station (it's in the photograph I posted earlier of Chatswood station) around 1963 or '64, Woolworths then moved their variety store there, and the Big W moved to the old Benjamin's department store site on the western side of the railway, when Benjamin's closed its doors. The western side of Chatswood has never been a good site for shopping and the Big W later closed down and the building became home to a market (the stalls as I recall them were pretty rubbishy, but there was a rather good plant nursery in there) until that too failed. The building remained vacant for a while until it was redeveloped as part of an office tower complex. My main memory of Benjamin's, which was rather like Grace Bros, was the car park - to my eyes it was huge (it was the biggest one I had seen until Grace Bros opened up a few years later) and the passageway from the covered part of the car park to the shop itself passed through a series of window displays of goods they had for sale.

The other thing of note in that photograph is that the two shops with the striped canvas on the awnings were demolished for the construction of the Grace Arcade, which connected Grace Bros to Victoria Ave (Grace Bros had street entrances on Victor St and Anderson St, but the entry from Victoria Ave was through the shopping arcade).

Jim

 

After that diversion into the history of shopping in Chatswood, I think I had better get back on track and post a few railway photos. Here we have 4201 and 4836 on display at Sydney Terminal for the 125th anniversary of the NSW railways in 1980:

 

Railmotors not going anywhere at Waterfall:

 

Hi Geoff

I have three (and only three) other photographs of Chatswood. I took them in the early 1970s, probably in 1973 or 74.







Not quite Chatswood, but just two stations down the line - another of my father's photographs from 1958 or 59, this time of Lindfield - unfortunately no trains, as he had his back to the station fence when he took this:



Regards.

Jim

 

Oops - I stand corrected. Obviously it is Gordon. The problem is that my father hardly labelled any of his photographs and, to my eyes, the view corresponded with my childhood memories of what Lindfield shops looked like. We also lived for a year and a half in the Migrants Housing Settlement at Bradfield Park, and would have been there at the time this photograph was taken so it seemed logical that a photograph of some suburban shops would have been somewhere local. I should have checked Google Streetview first......

And yes, Myer at Gordon was originally Farmers, which is how you ended up with two Myer stores just a few suburbs apart.

 

Here's the Vintage train at and around Lidcombe. Not sure of the year, but it was probably in the mid 1970s:

 

Here's something a bit different - a (somewhat faded) photo of one of the items in the NSW Rail Transport Museum from the days before the move to Thirlmere. Unfortunately I can't find any reference to this vehicle, although I seem to recall it was used on one of the privately owned colliery lines. Perhaps someone can fill in the blanks.....

 

A train in a bottle, so to speak - a 600/700 class (I think) railmotor and a glass drinking water bottle (I wonder how many people remember them) at Sydney Terminal around 1973 or thereabouts.

 

I used to drive through there quite often in the 80s and early 90s, as I used to live at Greystanes and my In-Laws lived at Five Dock. Going the back way through Lidcombe and Auburn through to Burwood or Croydon used to be a much less congested trip back then than using Parramatta Road or the M4.

Jim

 

A couple of photos taken in the suburbs:

Two 46 class with a Sydney bound Indian Pacific at Newtown (not sure of the date - possibly around 1974)



48 class at the northern end of Hornsby station in 1969

 

3820 on a tour from Sydney terminal to Taree and back - 24 February 1974.

At Yumbunga:



taking on water at Stroud (can't remember if this was on the forward or return journey):




I think this was at Taree, but I forgot to label the photo):



At Kimbriki:

 

The Western Endeavour - the first steam locomotive hauled train to operate across from Sydney to Perth. It departed Sydney Terminal on the 22 August 1970 and arrived at East Perth on 28 August.

 

And, from 1969, number 78 standing on a plinth in the car park at Enfield, before it became part of the NSWRTM collection: