Canberra Railway Museum’s Bob Hall and Sylvia Jamieson. Photo: James Coleman.
“Persistence” is the name fellow volunteers have told him should be written across its sides.
Bob Hall has been painstakingly restoring the same 1800s train carriage at the Canberra Railway Museum in Kingston for 24 years. But this month, the mammoth project reached a major milestone – the carpets went in.
But this isn’t just any train carriage. It was a saviour to hundreds of NSW’s most needy residents for three decades.
“It essentially had two lives,” Mr Hall explains.
“The first 35 years of its life was as a sleeper car, and that’s what we’re restoring it to be, but for the next 30 years of its life it was a travelling dental clinic.
“It was among two of three cars in its class to be converted and used for travelling around the state on a circuit – for anything up to three months at a time – to country towns offering free dental work for the unemployed and pensioners and people like that who couldn’t afford a private dentist and who received government assistance.”
Built in 1901, it finally retired from service in 1966 and ended up outdoors at the Goulburn Rail Heritage Centre. The Canberra Railway Museum then acquired it in 1977, for the grand total of $120 (including transport to Canberra).
All the dental equipment had been removed, except for the wooden partitions which separated the waiting room from the “surgery” rooms. The rest was a rotten mess.
“Very little was done with it until the end of 2001 when I decided to take it on as a project … and I had to spend a couple of months cleaning out the interior so I could just walk from one end to the other.”
At the time, Mr Hall had moved to Canberra after establishing the Yass Railway Museum and “was looking for a project”.
“When I first looked at it, it had these pressed metal ceilings, and my first thought was I could make replicas of those because I spent most of my working life as a fibreglass manufacturer, and so I spent the next two years making all these fresh fibreglass ceilings.”
After weeks of liaising with a carpet supplier in Sydney, comparing photos and matching patterns, the floor was finally finished late last month (Mr Hall says the museum is still hunting for a qualified upholsterer to restore the seats, though).
Mr Hall says they’ve had conversations with the ACT Heritage Council about the carriage, but it’s unlikely to make the cut for a listing due to a lack of proof it operated here. But the ‘Canberra Monaro Express’, the previous service between Sydney and Canberra, and onto Cooma, obviously did the run and did include sleeper cars.
Photos showing the mess the car was in when the museum bought it in 1977. Photo: James Coleman.
Most of the cars in the state at the time slept 28, but in the late 1800s, the railways realised they needed smaller options for regional mail routes, and settled on 20-berth cars from the US company Pullman.
The 16 men’s berths are separated by a door from the four women’s berths, a ratio reflected by patronage of the railways at the time.
“What George Pullman produced was pretty revolutionary – certainly state of the art at the time – but as time went on, people wanted a bit more privacy and these cars were relegated to secondary duties,” Mr Hall says.
He hopes once the carriage passes its inspection with NSW’s railway authority, it can once again return to the rails – if only for very special occasions. And even if he’s not alive to see it.
“I’ve often wondered if I should have logged how many hours I’ve spent on it, but I’d probably just frighten myself,” he says.
“It’s taken up the last quarter of my life. I would like to travel on it before I die, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll travel in it after I die because I intend for my ashes to be implanted under one of the seats.”
The seat cushions fold out to convert into sleeping berths. Photo: James Coleman.
If Bob gets his wish, he may not be the only non-Earthly presence on board.
“A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues was taking a woman through the car one day, and the woman just froze. He turned around and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ and she said, ‘I can feel a presence. He died of cancer. He loved travelling in this car,” Mr Hall says.
“We nicknamed him George after George Pullman, but he’s never appeared since. I’ve taken a few photographs, and last week, in the ones I took of the new carpet, there were shafts of light coming through the top windows – I say that’s George’s ray of approval.”
Either way, he hopes the carriage’s resident ghost “isn’t too much of an obnoxious prick” to spend time with.
