If a train passes in Woollahra, does it make a sound? And more importantly, will there be anyone around to hear it?

If you’re waiting for a train in the affluent east Sydney suburb of Woollahra, be thankful for this bench. You’ll be waiting awhile.

This park provides a view of what would have been the only open-air station on Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs train line. In fact, the park itself should at this point be a flight of stairs carrying the townsfolk of Woollahra down to the station, that gateway to the world. So what happened?

It could be that tired old story: greedy developers, community action, triumph of the little people over big business and nasty ol’ gubment etc. Let’s find a different way to tell it.
A train line for Sydney’s eastern suburbs had been on the cards from the turn of the 20th century. John Job Crew Bradfield, in his infinite public transport wisdom, knew that the people out there trapped between the leviathan and the Tasman would need a cheap, easy escape. 

The eastern suburbs don’t do cheap, don’t you know, and they certainly have no reason to escape.

By the time the line was just about complete in the late 1970s (after several subterranean attempts), opposition to a train station in Woollahra had congealed into a hardened crust. There would be no breaking it.

The red rattlers would ferry in all the scum of the west, they said, not to mention all those other undesirables. Crime would increase, and why should they have to have any crime? Then there was the noise: the ambience in their pool rooms might be disturbed. 

People power won out, and the government of the day relented, but not before a final act of appeasement: the line was fitted with futuristic sleeper technology that made Woollahra’s stretch of track the quietest in the country. It’s true; I missed three trains going past while I was waiting to get a good picture just because I hadn’t heard them.

I could hear the screams of bratty rich kids from the school up the road, and the late-70s NSW Government’s timid tones of appeasement echoed by wealthy parents. There’s no tech to block that out.

In the years since the station was completed, abandoned and forgotten, Woollahra has – through the character of its residents – transformed itself into a suburb you wouldn’t want to catch a train to anyway. I mean, unless you wanted to see the uh…well, there’s the…er, you, uh…wait, what’s so great about Woollahra again?