Alison Visits Huntly Station
I go visit the newest station on Victoria's rail network in celebration of our newest Premier.
Congratulations to Victoria’s newest Premier, Jacinta Marie Allan, sworn into the job yesterday.
Since the swearing in of the Andrews government, Allan has served as Victoria’s Minister for Transport, overseeing massive projects such as countless level crossing removals, the extension of the South Morang line to Mernda, and the beginning of the Suburban Rail Loop, for which she’s also the inaugural minister for.
But the thing that interests me most, and the reason we’re here today, is because of the new stations that Jacinta Allan has overseen during her tenure as transport minister.
Jacinta Allan is the first Premier in Victorian history to be born in Bendigo. In her role both as MP for Bendigo East and as transport minister, she’s been one of the key advocates for the not-very-well named Bendigo Metro project. I’ll be frank, I know more about trains than the normal person and I’m not entirely clear what Bendigo Metro is.
From what I can tell, it seems to have involved increased services to Bendigo in its first stage, and upgraded signalling in its second stage. But what we’re here to talk about today is Bendigo Metro 3, which involved the opening of three new stations.
Two of them, Goornong and Raywood, make enough sense. They’re in smallish towns on the outskirts of Bendigo that closed as part of the New Deal for Country Passengers, implemented in the late-1970s/early 1980s. I went to Goornong when it initially opened back in late 2021, and it’s about what you’d expect. Small country town, pub, primary school, post office. Not much to write home about, but plenty of towns like it have V/Line stations.
Huntly is, uh, different.
This morning I took the train to Huntly. To be specific, I took the 07:02 train from Southern Cross to Echuca. It was supposed to arrive at Huntly at 09:15, it was about a minute late.
I was the only passenger to get off at Huntly Station. Here’s the one meh photo I took of the train at the platform.
And then it left. And the station was empty.
And I mean empty. There wasn’t another train coming for more than an hour, so no-one was waiting for the next one yet.
There was some nice shaded seating, complete with up-to-date timetables and Myki fare information.
Further down the platform, another cute little bench, some bins…
But all around the station, there’s nothing but…fields.
Leaving the platform, it became clear there was not a single soul at that station other than me. I did see a lone hard hat, presumably left there by a tradie.
But the parking area was completely empty.
Could people have accessed the station by alternate means of transit? Well, maybe in theory. There was a bus stop with shelter near this parking area, with a sign helpfully explaining that it was for use as a train replacement coach stop. To my knowledge, no scheduled coach services stop at Huntly.
And another bus stop on the entrance further away from the track, though with no signage this time.
And that, my friends, is Huntly station.
And yeah, that is a dirt road. When I said there was nothing around Huntly station, I meant it. Huntly itself — a Bendigo fringe suburb of about 3500 — is not actually in the middle of nowhere. But the station is. In fact, as of the last census, it wasn’t even in Huntly — it was in the even smaller locality of Bagshot, population 355. (They have since moved the boundaries, so Huntly station is actually in Huntly.) A look at Google Maps shows how far away Huntly station is from — well, anything.
It’s not like this was the closest you could get to Huntly with existing rail alignment, as you can probably tell. A station near where “Demijohn Court” is on that map would have been much closer to town. But the government chose to build where they did, probably in part because of new housing estates, like that “Provenance Estate” you can see outlined. There’s a sign for the estate right near Huntly station.
And Huntly station isn’t as isolated as it seems based off Google Maps. Houses at Provenance Estate have started to spring up. I know, because I walked about 2.2 kilometres down Wakeman Road and Waratah Road, to the nearest public bus stop that ran to Bendigo, because I was not in the mood to wait three hours for the next train back to Melbourne.1
That blob of seemingly-fictional roads on Google Maps is real, and does indeed have some houses, and along my walk to the bus stop, I saw many, many tradies, working to build new houses along the way. Maybe one of them left that hard hat. The choice of location for Huntly station might seem strange now, but it’s not complete lunacy. It ought to make more sense in about 10 years’ time, and in theory, I’m in favour of forward-thinking transport planning.
I don’t live in Bendigo. I’m not going to use this station other than to write this post. I’m not gonna provide a value judgement. Instead, I’ll leave you with two things.
Firstly, I’m not actually sure how much the stations cost to build. The whole Bendigo Metro 3 project apparently cost $49.6 million, but I can’t find a more recent primary source on that. In early 2022, I sent off a freedom of information request, seeking to discover how much Goornong station cost to construct.
I was knocked back, on the grounds that it would breach rules about trade secrets and confidentiality, but I did get a figure at the time, in the notice of decision, stating that the value of the contract to deliver the three stations (Goornong, Huntly, and Raywood) was $16,931,204. Looking for that contract myself, a year later, it seems to have gone up to $21,601,661.
I’m not an expert on this stuff, and I’m certainly not implying anything untoward.2 But $21 million for what are three nice-looking, but extremely basic, railway stations seems a bit much, in my humble opinion.
Secondly, the bus route which I took to Bendigo — the 5, from Huntly to Lansell Square SC — really ought to be extended to Huntly station, because without either a car or a willingness to walk 2 kilometres, it’s currently inaccessible for most Huntly residents. Wakeman Road is a dirt road, of course, so that might present some difficulties, but the station’s been open for more than a year. Surely, now that Jacinta Allan is Premier, she can get that road paved and buses running down it?
A girl can dream.
PS: All the photos from this article are available in a Flickr album, for hobbyists and enterprising Wikipedia editors alike. They’re public domain, so no attribution is required, but appreciated if you’re so inclined.
Maddeningly, the train timetable does show a coach running from Moama to Bendigo, connecting with the 10:30 train from Bendigo to Southern Cross, that stops at every station on the Echuca line — Echuca, Rochester, Elmore, Goornong, and Epsom — but not Huntly! It would have been perfectly timed, given I left Huntly at around 9:30, but I missed it. Grr.
Though any journalists who wish to look into this should note that my DMs are open.