Port Pirie - One Town - Six Railway Stations
Channel: Outdoorstype
Date: 2023-02-16

The regional South Australian city of Port Pirie had six different railway stations over the years. Let’s find out why. 

*EDIT* Terowie is south of Peterborough, not north, as the animation describes. It's meant to say  Quorn. Oops.

Port Pirie was declared a town in 1876. At that time, it was the railhead of a narrow-gauge railway heading inland to Gladstone and the surrounding agricultural districts. The first smelter was built in 1889 to process raw materials from Broken Hill via a new railway line.

It became a key junction for the different railways that were to come from Adelaide, Perth, and Sydney. As needs changed, stations sprung up all over town to cater for the different railway gauges and the growing size of the trains. You can see just how much space the railyards once covered. 

Rail began to bypass the town by the 70s and by 1988, when the last real station in Port Pirie closed, the age of regional South Australian rail was well and truly over. 

There’s still plenty of railway action in Port Pirie. The smelter is one of the world’s largest and trains still run through the city to feed it.

You can still see 3 of the six stations and appreciate just how big the railways once were - but let’s find out more about some of the stations that are long gone.

The first station was built at Port Pirie South in 1876 but not long after the line to Gladstone started up, a small, corrugated iron shed was built as the ticket and parcels office for a passenger service in Ellen Street in the heart of the city.

This Ellen Street station was replaced by a striking Victorian Pavilion in 1902 - facing the street - which was unusual for the SAR. The tracks were removed from the street in 1967 and the station closed. It’s now a National Trust museum.

Port Pirie and Solomontown originally developed as two separate towns until they effectively merged and Solomontown station opened in 1911 as a suburban passenger stop. It was never anything more than a basic ground level stopping place, but it remained important as the stop for narrow gauge trains from the Gladstone line. It closed along with old narrow-gauge lines in 1967.

Once the Trans-Australian Railway was extended from Port Augusta, and the SAR broad gauge had reached the city - Port Pirie Junction station opened in 1937, opposite Solomontown station to accommodate the new break of gauge. Locals considered both stations to be called ‘Solomontown’. 

Both were demolished after they were replaced by biggest station in Port Pirie yet.

Port Pirie station (Mary Elie Street) - the fifth station in Port Pirie - was built in 1967 not just as a change of gauge - but for longer passenger trains than ever before. The 700 metre platform was the longest in Australia, but the end was coming soon.

In 1978, 600 metres of new track formed the "Coonamia triangle", enabling freight and passenger trains to bypass Port Pirie altogether. 

The final station was never really a station anyway. Coonamia was a "provisional stopping place" for passenger trains 5 k’s by rail south-east of the centre of the city. The last passenger trains stopped there in 2010.

South Australian railway history is convoluted due the different gauges that came and went and so little remains it’s hard to unpick it all. Nevertheless I hope you enjoyed this video. Give me a thumbs up if you did.

Stay tuned for part 2 - the drone flights over Port Pirie’s old railyards.

Thanks for watching. Bye for now.

IMAGE CREDITS:

PUBLIC DOMAIN UNLESS CREDITED

Lionel Noble Collection | https://lionelnoble.com/about/

Weston Langford | https://www.westonlangford.com/about/

State Library of South Australia

OTHERS:

Employee of the Australian News and Information Bureau, CC BY 4.0 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Commonwealth_Railways_Budd_car_CB2_and_4-wheel_van_at_Mary_Elie_Street_station_platform%2C_Port_Pirie%2C_ca_1969.jpg

Photographer: Ken Brine. By courtesy of the National Railway Museum, Australia, CC BY-SA 4.0 

Trans-Australian train westbound from Port Pirie Junction to Port Augusta, Sep 1938 -- loco Ga 24 John L. Buckland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons