Newport Workshops Dining Room History

Friday Facts and Fotos Friday 29th September 2023 FFF 62.

Newport workshops Dining room history

Without having access to original documents and VR department records there are some facts about the workshops which are poorly documented. A report in the Melbourne ‘Argus’ from Jan 1922, says that the dining room at the workshops was opened as an experiment in 1908. The first two photos below show the original kitchen and dining room which seated about 80 people. They are from the PROV files and show the date as 1912 which could be correct. The first few years were difficult with changes to the leasing arrangements. The railways thought they were on a winner providing good meals at a cheap price to attract workers. Eventually they decided that the dining room should be staffed by their own railway refreshment branch. So the capacity kept expanding until by 1920 the dining room was daily feeding over 1000 men. Each person had a numbered place at the same table each day. Each table had a captain whose job was to have everyone at his table to fill out an order form for what food they wanted the following day. That way there was very little waste, the orders were cooked well and ready at the exact time, and they could get 500 people seated, fed, and moved out in the 30 minutes allowed. And it was cheap, 8½ pence, about one third of what it would cost for the same meal at a café elsewhere. The next four PROV photos of the kitchen and dining room are dated 1930 when the dining room had a capacity of 500 feeding 1500 in three half hour sittings. At that point our information trail runs cold. We have an aerial photo taken in 1951 which shows it still there. Then there is another gap of 24 years when a photo shows a Hitachi set in the garden platform which couldn’t have been taken before 1975. This shows an outdoor large stores area in the foreground where the dining room building once stood. So can anyone provide information about the decline of use, when the dining room was closed, and when the building was removed?