I’ve just belatedly seen the announcement that work has officially commenced on reopening Wallerawang Station, which hasn’t seen a passenger train since 1989.
I’ve got a personal interest here: this was one of the stations my grandfather, who worked for NSW Railways his entire career, was posted at, back when it was an important junction servicing multiple lines. Now it’s a close-to-forgotten functional suburb of Lithgow, but it’s going to get train service again soon.
Given the station relaunch isn’t scheduled until late 2026 and that plans to do this were first mooted in 2022, noticing this a few days late arguably doesn’t matter. What is eye-opening is the cost of the reopening, given that the plan is for an entirely unstaffed station serving a community of just 2,000-odd people.
Getting Wallerawang back up to scratch is scheduled to cost $7 million. The final figure will probably be higher.
What does $7 million score you? Firstly, “building assessments and improvements to adjacent buildings including painting, cleaning and refurbishment of existing signage,” according to the announcement. This will be followed by “minor infrastructure construction works to bring the station up to the standard required to allow trains to stop there”.
Note this doesn’t include any major changes to the rails themselves. We don’t need any adjustments to account for different trains. The XPT trains which currently pass Wallerawang are the same ones that ran back in 1989 when trains last stopped here on their way between Lithgow and Dubbo. The more recent and twice-daily Bathurst Bullet commuter service isn’t likely to have added to the strain materially. The fact is, construction of public buildings is eye-wateringly expensive, even when they’re not much more than a big concrete platform.
How many trains will stop at Wallerawang when it reopens?
The announcement says that the official timetable won’t be announced until closer to the reopening, but it’s not hard to work out what the likely inclusions are:
- The daily Sydney-Dubbo service. Like Rydal and Tarana just up the line, this will be a request stop – if no-one is booked or makes a request on board, the train won’t stop. Expect it to pass through on its way to Dubbo around 9:50am, with the return Sydney service at around 6:10pm. (And expect it to be late quite often – the city services always get priority right out to Lithgow, as I know all too well.)
- I wouldn’t expect the once-a-week Sydney-Broken Hill service, which runs out west on Mondays then returns Tuesdays, to stop here even as a request – since it doesn’t do that for Rydal or Tarana either.
- The Daily Bathurst Bullet service. There are two “Bathurst Bullet” services from Bathurst to Sydney in the morning, and two services from Sydney to Bathurst in the evening, all of which currently pass Wallerawang.
So expect city-bound trains at Wallerawang around 6:30am and 8:48am, and Bathurst-bound options at around 5:34pm and 8:21pm – except on Wednesdays, where long-standing timetable weirdness from Sydney means the first evening train won’t come through until 6:20pm. All of these can be paid for with an Opal card.
The original 2022 announcement explicitly mentioned the Bathurst Bullet. It rather sneakily proclaimed the station “will be able to be a timetabled stop”, not actually committing to a train stopping there. That said, I can’t imagine that $7 million would be spent just so that the XPT can optionally pick up at Wallerawang once a day in each direction.
Right now, Wallerawang gets road coach services most days connecting to Orange and Lithgow. I’d expect those to continue, since they still pass through lots of other communities that don’t have a rail service at all. In the meantime, I’ll be paying more attention than usual the next time I’m on a Dubbo-bound train passing this way.
For more railway digging, check out the list of Sydney’s busiest stations, the weird history of Orange East Fork, the tale of Cootamundra West and the real origins of Garfield Station’s name.
Station image: Wikimedia Commons
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