Historic Photo of the Day: 2025-10-19

Today's historic photo of the day: Exactly 40 years ago today we see the railway station at Binalong, NSW, October 19, 1985. Binalong is 354km south of Sydney on the NSW Main South line. Rails first reached town in 1876 when the line was extended from Bowning. However, the track and station seen here don’t date from that time. When the line was duplicated in 1915, long stretches, including here, were laid on completely new alignments to flatten the grades that the small locomotives of the day had to surmount. This 'new' Binalong station was opened in 1915 and the old track and station, to the left of this photo, was abandoned. Binalong was served by passenger trains until the withdrawal of the South XPT (the replacement for the South Mail) in June 1985. So, when this photo was taken, the station had been closed to passengers for about 5 months. It was however still manned (as you can tell by how neatly maintained it was) and it was in use as a signal box and double line block point. The manual signalling was replaced with colour light signals in the early 2000s and today, whilst the station still stands, it is not used. Regular heavy freight trains and twice daily passenger trains pass through here, but these days, none stop at Binalong. Today there are two XPT services per day through here to Melbourne, plus two weekly Xplorer trains to Griffith. The platform, station building and even the water tanks remain in situ today, however they are all disused and fairly unkempt even though the railway itself sees a lot of passing rail traffic.