Going digging

Hawthorn station certainly looks old enough.

And the roof over platform 2 and 3 is quite ornate.

But this PROV image shows that the platform hasn’t always had a roof.

PROV image VPRS 12800/P000 H 4668

And the claims as to the provenance of the structure are a little loose – for instance, this web page straight out of the 1990s.

The station buildings are weatherboard and are part of the original buildings used at Flinders Street.

The Wikipedia page on the station isn’t much better:

In 1890, an island platform was provided to accommodate the newly opened branch line to Kew, using a canopy from the original Flinders Street station.

But I finally got somewhere when I opened the ‘Hawthorn Railway Station Complex’ entry on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Hawthorn Railway Station first opened on 13 April 1861. The central portion of the timber building on Platform 1 dates from the early 1880s, and additions have been constructed at both ends of this building.

After the railway line from Hawthorn was extended to Camberwell in 1882 a second platform was built at Hawthorn to accommodate the duplicated track. A two-station single track branch line linking Hawthorn to Kew opened in 1887, and following this the present-day island Platform 2 and 3 was constructed in 1890.

The large canopy on this island platform, originally located at Flinders Street Station over the St Kilda and Port Melbourne platforms, was dismantled and then rebuilt at Hawthorn on its Platform 2 and 3 in 1901.

Paydirt.

And over to Trove

I then headed over to newspaper archives at Trove, and the story became clearer.

From The Age 16 February 1901 spelled out the what.

The following tenders have been accepted by the Railway department:

Taking down iron verandah at Port Melbourne platform, Flinders Street station, and reerecting portion at Hawthorn station,
A. Challingsworth,
£599 12/0

And The Argus explained the why:

Some months ago the Commissioner of Railways promised to provide proper shelter accommodation at the Hawthorn railway station and yesterday he accepted the tender of Mr A Challingsworth for taking down the iron verandah over the present Port Melbourne platform at the Princes Bridge station and re-erecting portion of it at the Hawthorn station.

The dismantling of the Port Melbourne platform is the first step towards re-modelling the Flinders Street Station in accordance with the scheme for the new central railway station. Passengers on the Port Melbourne line may shortly be transferred to another platform while the proposed alterations are being effected.

The material to be employed to cover in the Hawthorn station will, Mr Mathieson states, last for many years to come, and the new verandah will extend well down the platform beyond the overhead footbridge, which will also be enclosed.

By June 18 work on the island platform had been completed.

The time which has elapsed since the railway authorities began to cover the island platform at the Hawthorn station with a shelter shed and the fact, that no steps have been taken to elect a similar roof over the southern platform, has led to the belief that the necessity for it has been overlooked . The deputy Commissioner states, however, that the footbridge connecting the Kew and Camberwell lines and the up platform will also be covered in before Christmas.

With the rest done by July.

The shelter over the “up” platform and Kew side of the Hawthorn railway station is now almost completed. The work was started about three months ago, but was considerably delayed
owing to a difficulty in getting the proper lengths of roofing iron. The structure affords an excellent shelter from the rain and will undoubtedly prove a great boon to the travelling public in wet weather.

But where at Flinders Street did it come from?

Today there is no “St Kilda and Port Melbourne platforms” at Flinders Street Station – back in the 1980s both railways were converted to light rail, and are now tram routes 96 and 109.

But the platforms still exist, immortalised in painted tiles at the entrance to platform 10 and 11.

But the station we’re interested in is the “old” Flinders Street Station.

SLV image ID 1742413

This photo from 1888 shows platform shelters, but they don’t match the ones found at Hawthorn.

SLV image ID 3250858

But this aerial view of the station from the north-west is much more useful.

PROV image VPRS 12800/P0001 H 2825

The roof over what is now platform 8 and 9 looks a lot like the one now at Hawthorn.

PROV image VPRS 12800/P0001 H 2825

And this lower angle view from the Swanston Street bridge confirms it.

PROV image VPRS 12800/P0001 H 2770

The fine ironwork detail and mansard roof line clearly visible.

PROV image VPRS 12800/P0001 H 2770

So that factoid was true after all.

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I was flicking through a copy of “Engineering Marvels of Australia – Australia’s Railways” by Alison Hidek when I had a case of deja vu.

With the photo of a Melbourne train in the bottom left corner looking awfully familiar.

Was it a photo of mine that I’d uploaded to Wikipedia way back in November 2007?

Photo by Marcus Wong Wongm, via Wikimedia Commons

After a check of the title page:

Yes!

p21b – Caulfield Group City Loop portal by Marcus Wong via Wikimedia

Content uploaded to Wikimedia Commons is free to reuse, provided you follow the terms specified by the author.

Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page

In my case – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
You are free:
– to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
– to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
– attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
– share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

So everything was above board.

Footnote

I’ve written about finding Wikipedia uploads in real life before, in Keeping track of V/Line ‘borrowed’ photos.

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Not everyone can rely on Dancer and Prancer to get them around tomorrow.

So we're putting on free public transport right around Victoria.

Merry Christmas. pic.twitter.com/q8SesyxQ5H

— Dan Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) December 24, 2019

My first through – I’ve seen that photo of a V/Line train before – I uploaded it to Wikipedia a decade ago.

Photo by Marcus Wong Wongm, via Wikimedia Commons

So where did the other photos come from? The Z3 class tram looked familiar – Wikipedia again.

Photo by Liamdavies, via Wikimedia Commons

And the bus – another photo via Wikipedia.

Photo by Liamdavies, via Wikimedia Commons

But as for the source of the X’Trapolis train photo – I’ve come up blank – if only they’d followed the Creative Commons licence…

You are free:

• to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.

And through the looking glass

If you take a close look at the original photo on Wikipedia, you’ll notice a green advertisement for Monteith’s apple cider.

Which has been photoshopped out of the ‘Free Public Transport on Christmas Day’ post – replaced by a panel of PTV green triangles.

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There was a good reason for that photo being familiar – I took it at Richmond station back on October 13, 2005.

Over the past few years I’ve uploaded hundreds of my photos to Wikipedia – over 500 at last count – but the photo I found had been uploaded by someone else.

If pinching my photo isn’t enough, the thief had also gotten the date taken completely wrong – by October 2013 the remaining Hitachi fleet had all been stripped of the green and old ‘PTC’ livery when they received a minor refurbishment in 2007, followed by a Metro Trains sticker job in 2009.

Rather than clean up the mess of copyright infringement, the simplest way to fix it was a deletion request – just navigate through the byzantine speedy deletion request page and it is deleted!

Footnote

The bureaucratic processes of Wikipedia have been flagged as the biggest risks to the growth of the free encyclopaedia – both Slate and MIT Technology Review have written on the topic.

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Tottenham Yard

Tottenham Yard was opened in the western suburb of Tottenham from the 1920s as part of a project to improve freight movement in Victoria. The majority of freight traffic in the state was from the north or western areas, and was being remarshalled into trains at Melbourne Yard. This caused inefficiencies with the large number of trains needing to enter the Melbourne city, so the yard was opened for the marshalling of trains before they were sent to Melbourne Yard.

Laid with broad gauge trackage, Tottenham is a gravitational yard with a slight slope from the Sunshine end towards the city. The yard consists of four groups of sidings: arrival roads, two groups of classification roads, and departure tracks. Heavy usage of the yard ended with the gauge conversion of the main line to Adelaide in 1995, and with the decline of broad gauge traffic in general, large areas of the yard are now used for wagon storage. Tottenham station is located to the south of the yard.

The part conversion of Tottenham Yard to standard gauge is expected to commence next year which will allow larger Standard Gauge freight trains to terminate at Tottenham with trip working from the yard to Melbourne and return.

What caught my eye was the “expected to commence next year” line in the final paragraph, which lacked any mention of the date when the statement was originally written. So when was this “partial conversion to standard gauge” supposed to have started?

Thankfully Wikipedia makes available the full edit history of each and every article available, which makes tracking down the source of the statement just a few clicks away – 19 July 2011!

Three years on, and nothing has happened on the partial conversion of Tottenham Yard to standard gauge front – yet another railfan rumour that came to nothing!

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• She went broke making ATMs for midgets.
• She worked on a short-running TV show “Shower Time With Uncle Bert”.

She said that the first time she found out about her supposed past was in an interview, when the presenter started asking questions about her TV show with Bert Newton. She then went on to mention that three of the midget ATMs were still in use in Melbourne.

A few minutes after the segment on Good News Week went to air, people were helpful enough to add the “facts” into the page, at least until the page was locked:

Revision history for the "Amanda Keller" page

Of the 140 edits of the page, 19 of them have been after the mention of Wikipedia vandalism on TV.

A quick inspection of the revision history shows “Shower Time With Uncle Bert” never appeared in the page before the mention on Good News Week, and the same goes for her ATMs for midget business.  A Google search for “Shower Time With Uncle Bert” also turns up nothing:

Google search for "Shower Time for Uncle Bert"

I’ll have to add “invent fictitious Wikipedia vandalism” to the list of gags for my next TV appearance.

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