Casino Xpt
I came across an old photo recently from the days when my mother was a young girl working in the dining cars for the New South Wales Railways. She had stopped over for a crew change at a place called Casino in the far north of the state. Forty eight years later I found myself passing through Casino after returning from a vacation with my family. I had to, just had to stop at Casino Railway Station, and step into the photo myself.
It was 1966, and my mother, a young girl by the name of Barbara Hutt, had been working as a railway girl on-board the Brisbane Limited. Casino was the crew change point where the dining crew would end their shift and camp the night in the barracks before working a train back to Sydney the following day. I of course was not on the scene yet, my parents had yet to meet when my mother was working a train back from Melbourne where my father had traveled for an athletics meet. Being a key stop on the Sydney-Brisbane North Coast Line, Casino still sees its fair share of trains pass through town today. However, a closer inspection of the photo above reveals that a lot of Casino's railway landscape has in fact changed. My mother appears to be standing with a wide, curved expanse of platform that is separated by two tracks. When I visited Casino Railway Station in July 2014, there were four tracks along the front of the railway station.
| Casino Railway Station 2014. Today there is no platform 2. It was filled in sometime in the 1990's. |
On Trip Planner it shows the Casino XPT leaving Central at 7.10am arriving Wauchope at 1.48pm and the connecting bus arriving Port Macquarie at 3.11pm. However when I go to NSW TrainLink to book it only shows the North Coast XPT leaving Central at 11.41am and arriving Port at 7.10pm. Do bookings open later for intermediate stops on the Casino XPT?
- Casino railway station is the terminus of the daily Casino XPT from Sydney and there is a daily service to and from Brisbane via the Brisbane XPT. In the 1920s, a never completed railway branch line to Bonalbo was started. A line was also proposed from Casino via Tabulam and even a line all the way to Tenterfield.
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- This thread is about the Brisbane XPT becoming a Casino XPT. On shorter domestic routes, buses, trains, and planes are all in competition with each other. As I said in a previous post, railways cannot compete in terms of speed with airlines, so they must promote the experience. Their prices however, must still remain competitive with airlines.
This led me to do some sleuthing. Armed with my camera, I walked to the far south end of the railway station, that's the Sydney end of the platform, and discovered a clue as to why it was so hard to stand in the same position where my mother's photo had been taken back in 1966. Casino was once in fact an island style platform with tracks on both sides when it opened in 1930. Today only platform 1 faces the rails. The station had been remodeled sometime in the 1990's as part of the Countrylink Station upgrade program, with the land filled in to accommodate a more convenient passenger set down area, car park and road coach interchange. The site of the old barracks where my mother was standing in the photo is now a child day care centre on the corner of Colches and Canterbury Streets. The upside I guess is that the railway station has a rather impressive facade facing the entrance to the station. Given that it was once platform 2, I suppose it is hardly surprising.
| Standing where my mother would have waited at Casino Railway Station to work the return train to Sydney in 1966. Only this is 48 years later, in July 2014. |