Goodbye Bungaree Loop

Bungaree Station in 1986 (via @railmaps)

The Ballarat line has been shut down for a month from 28 December, as part of the final push to complete the Ballarat Line Upgrade project. This means that the last train to ever run on the Bungaree Loop ran on 27 December, so let's take a look at the history of the line. 

The original line to Ballarat wasn't the direct line we use today, it was the one that came via Geelong, and it reached Ballarat in 1862. This was followed by a big lull in construction, with basically nothing built in the area for over a decade, until the lines were extended north and west to Creswick and Beaufort in 1874. Five years later, they finally made progress on what would eventually become the direct line to Melbourne - starting from the Ballarat end. 

The bluestone Dunnstown distillery (via John Collins & SLV)

On 7 May 1879 the short line to Gordon opened, serving Dunnstown, Bungaree and Wallace. While initially only open to passenger traffic, Dunnstown eventually had a number of freight sidings, including one for the nearby distillery - you can still see the heritage bluestone building from the train, which now houses the Cottonwood Springs water bottling plant. The distillery sidings were removed at some point before 1962; the station was closed to passengers in 1972, and closed to all traffic 5 years after that. 

Bungaree initially had a passenger platform with a reasonably substantial station building, as well as a freight platform, both of which lasted in pretty good nick till about 1988, despite the station closing to passengers in 1982 and completely in 1985. After 1988 the buildings were all gone, but the remains of the passenger platform were still very clearly visible whenever I took trains through here in the 2010s. A crossing loop was built nearby in the 1980s, essentially to replace the station as a place for trains to pass each other, which lasted right up till the early 2000s. 

Bungaree Station site in 1989, with just the platform remaining (via @railmaps)

From 1900, there was a 2.5km siding from Bungaree to the local racecourse, one of four racecourse railways in the Ballarat region. Apparently trains to the racecourse were halted towards the start of WW2 as an austerity measure, although the line wasn't officially closed till 1949. The line seems to have gone roughly northwest, over the future path of the freeway, but there's really nothing left of it these days - nor, seemingly, of the racecourse itself, which seems to have had its last meeting in 1961. 

Wallace seems to have initially had a similar setup to Bungaree, but fell by the wayside a bit earlier - it was closed to passengers in 1972 along with Dunnstown, and demolished three years later. I certainly don't remember there being anything to indicate there was ever a station there by the time I was passing through, but records indicate it was just to the north of what is now Bungaree-Wallace Road. 

Gordon Station in 1986 (via @railmaps)

Gordon Station is a long way south of the township it served, and had quite a unique round-roofed design - which I've seen referred to as a "prototype", but doesn't seem to have been repeated in many future stations. It was closed to passengers in 1982 along with Bungaree, though it remained in use by staff for another three years. Today it's been preserved by the Australian Railway Historical Society, so you can still see it as you go past - though it's set back a bit from the running line these days. 

The year after this short line opened, in 1880, an infill station was opened at Millbrook - essentially right where the Bungaree Loop now diverges from the direct line. Like the other stations on the line, it was hugely important for getting the local harvest of potatoes to market, and would have seen huge volumes of freight in the early days. However it was also one of the first to go, being effectively abolished from 1965. 

It was about five years after the Warrenheip-Gordon line opened that any progress was made from the other end, with the line from Sunshine to Melton opening on 02 April 1884. This line included two stations we know today, though under different names - Deer Park, which was then named Kororoit Creek, and Rockbank, which was then named Mount Atkinson. Ardeer opened exactly 45 years later, on 02 April 1929, while Caroline Springs and Cobblebank both opened in the late 2010s. 

Ballan Railway Station and its historic water tower in 2016

From that point, it seems like a concerted effort was made to build the line from both ends, with Ballan reached from the west in 1886, Bacchus Marsh from the east in 1887, and the two finally connected on 04 December 1889. This represented the first time Ballarat had a direct link to Melbourne - more than 27 years after the line via Geelong had reached the city. And to be honest, it's pretty lucky it was completed when it was - the recession of the 1890s saw a lot of infrastructure projects cancelled or scaled back, so if it had still been underway when that hit, who knows what might have happened. 

The more direct Millbrook route (left) opened in 2005 (via @MelbourneWay)

During the early 2000s, the Regional Fast Rail project saw a number of improvements to rail infrastructure to shorten travel times, and one of these was to take a bit of a shortcut from Millbrook to Dunnstown, with two significant viaducts over the Moorabool River and Lal Lal Creek valleys. This opened on 01 October 2005, but to allow trains to keep passing each other in this area, they decided to keep the Bungaree Loop as well - with the faster peak-direction trains using the direct line, and slower counter-peak trains going the long way. In addition to the longer distance, the line speed on the Bungaree Loop was lower, which meant pretty significant time differences between the two routes - and therefore highly variable journey times for passengers. 

With the Ballarat Line Upgrade project, most of the shortcut route will be duplicated - practically everywhere on flat earth between the two viaducts - which will mean trains can still pass each other, but without having to go the long way. 

An early map of the BLU project ("Spreadeagle" since renamed "Millbrook")

What does the future hold for the Bungaree Loop itself? I'm told that a short section at the eastern end will be kept as a works siding, but beyond that who knows. There's always the possibility of turning it into a rail trail, and it'd certainly be a pleasant part of the world to ride a bike through, but it's pretty isolated from any other cycling infrastructure and wouldn't really form a particularly useful link between any significant destinations. 

Currently, the only bus service connecting Bungaree and Wallace to the outside world is one that runs on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays only - heading from Mount Egerton into Ballarat by mid-morning, and back out after lunch. Gordon fares very slightly better, because it has access to those buses into Ballarat but also a bus to Ballan that runs five days a week - to Ballan early in the morning and back again in the evenings, seemingly timed for Melbourne commuters. 

A route like this could potentially build decent patronage in coming years

Just something that ran from Ballan to Ballarat via Gordon, Wallace, Bungaree and Warrenheip, multiple times a day, would be very useful to people - whether for local trips to work, the shops, the movies, and so on, or to connect them to the rail network for trips further afield. (I could even see it being used by tourists, if it stopped by Kryal Castle.) The populations of these towns are currently so low it's not surprising the buses are so sparse, but if Moorabool Shire is serious about increasing the number of people in these communities in the next few years, then a better bus service is not only viable but a necessity. 

I acknowledge the invaluable resources at vrhistory.com and Stations Past in preparing this post. 

My usual rule is to use Creative Commons photos in my posts, so you're normally free to share them yourselves; just be aware that this may not be the case for @railmaps and @MelbourneWay's photos in this post. 

The Stations Past website has some other good 1980s photos of several of these stations here which I didn't use due to copyright caution.