The Garden Platform

Friday, Facts & Fotos 3. 12 August ’22

The Garden Platform

When the Newport workshops opened in December, 1888 there was a major problem to get staff. Most of the first employees at the new Newport Workshops came from the Williamstown workshops which were being progressively wound down. So within just a few years the railways began running ’employees specials’ from the city to entice workers to the workshops who lived further afield. They built a special platform right in the middle of the newly built workshops and started with just a few trains per day. Soon workers were coming from anywhere in the Metro area.

The first photo is an enlargement of a PROV photograph showing dozens of workers making their way to the Garden platform. They could also be heading towards the dinning room which was just out of the photo to the left. This photo can be fairly accurately dated in the early 1920s because the overhead is in place which opened in July 1920 for electric train use, but the first aid building (cream brick building which is still there) built in 1927 had not yet been built.

In the second attachment, you will see that some of the arrivals were timetabled very close to each other. People who travelled on these services have told me that the early morning ones arrived alternatively at the Garden platform, then the next at the Tarp shop platform.

The third photo of West Block from PROV clearly shows the end of the Tarp Shop platform on the lower right and the associated tracks with overhead which extended from the platform between 12 road and the Blacksmiths building where the Kirkstall steam hammer and crane are still located. A friend told me recently that he travelled every day to the Tarp platform when he started at Newport in 1965, and there were still regular seven services every morning, two on Saturdays, and none on Sundays.

The special employee passenger special platforms at Newport are believed to be unique in the world. How VicTrack were given permission to demolish the Tarp shop platform in 2010 to build new Metro train storage sidings defies belief, but illustrates the fragile nature of the Preservation Groups efforts to preserve as much of the rich heritage Newport Railway Workshops still has to offer.