South Brisbane railway station

Okay, so I'm standing here at South Brisbane station, and it's pretty cool. You can tell it's an older station just by looking at it. It actually opened way back in 1884, but it was called Melbourne Street back then. This current building, the one I'm looking at, was put up in 1891, which makes it the second oldest railway station in central Brisbane. It even made it onto the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992, which is neat.

It's an elevated station, and right now I'm seeing one island platform with two faces and then a single side platform. The building itself is a long, two-story brick structure with a corrugated-iron roof. The part facing Grey Street has this really prominent central entrance with a pediment, and on either side, there are sloping corrugated-iron awnings supported by these cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals. You can see a lot of those Renaissance style elements, like Romanesque windows upstairs and pilasters. There used to be a garden park out front, but now it's a parking area.

The platforms are actually level with the upper floor of the main building, which I guess was planned because they were thinking about extending the line across the river. Platform 1 still has its original tank roof from 1891, with steel frames and more of those cast-iron columns. Platform 2 has a cantilevered butterfly roof that looks like it's from around 1918.

Apparently, this station was meant to be temporary, just until they could build across the river. But then the 1893 flood happened and washed away the Albert Bridge, so this station ended up being the main hub for all southern and western rail services for two and a half years! The flood was so bad that this was one of only a few places that still had phone connections to the north side of the river.

They expanded it quite a bit between 1914 and 1918, adding more platforms, but then some of those were removed later for the cross-river line. It's interesting to think about all the changes it's seen. For Expo '88, they did a big refurbishment, restoring the brickwork and cast iron, and replacing the roof. They even painted most of the exterior brickwork a kind of pink or peach, which I'm not sure is its original color, but it certainly stands out.