Railage Sketch of WA from 1922

Railage sketch and freight diagram of Western Australia : showing mileage of all stations connected
by rail with Perth and other centres, 3rd Edition, H.E.C. Robinson Ltd., 1922

I’d never seen this fantastic sketch of WA railways before when it popped up in a group on Facebook (“Railage Sketch and Freight Diagram of Western Australia”, 3rd Edition, 1922, H.E.C. Robinson Ltd.).

It’s not a map as such, more a schematic sketch of the railway routes, but importantly shows the name of every ‘station’ in the state at the time and mileage to Perth (or other centre). It’s a great resource for the club as we use WA station names on our main HO layout — deliberately picking one station starting with every letter of the alphabet to end up with 26 locations on the layout. (We had to stretch the rule about with ‘X’ — no stations in WA start with ‘X’! Instead we used the WA town name ‘Xantippe’ which was never served by the railways.)

This is another example from the wonderful free online resource that is Trove from the National Library of Australia: https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/26359059

That image above is quite low resolution — good enough to make out most of the names. The full, high-resolution version is a whopping 576 Mbyte image available from Trove (see link above) which is quite difficult to download or view even with a fast computer and good internet link. I have created a high resolution PDF version which is a much more manageable 13.2 Mbytes: nla.obj-233482959.pdf

Sid & Yvette Harvey

An article from The West Australian, Wednesday, 29 May, 1963 showing the WAMRC layout in the Harveys’ home in Cottesloe. 

As discussed at the last general meeting, a wonderful piece remembering early members of the club, Sid & Yvette Harvey, has been written by life member Don Finlayson — thanks Don!

By a terrific stroke of coincidence, a few months ago a member of the public gave us the above newspaper clipping above from May 1963 which is directly relevant to the story. Head over to the Harveys’ page to read all about it.