Buildings
The station opened in 1857 with station building (waiting room, ladies waiting room and ticket office) and attached four room residence and garden. The enclosed garden still contains mature exotic trees including cotoneaster, phoenix palm and orange. There is also an outbuilding to the north. In 1878 the windows, doors and west facing verandah over the platform were altered. The building is the third oldest surviving railway station in South Australia and distinct from the earlier 1856 Bowden and Alberton stations, having an attached residence. The buildings are classed as historic and listed on the Register of the National Estate. After Bowden, Alberton and St Kilda railway station, Melbourne, it is the fourth oldest railway station nationally.
The structure on the down platform (Gawler bound) was burnt down and replaced by the present shelter. There were sidings and a wood yard selling firewood west of this platform where the standard gauge line to Darwin now runs.
In 1880 a signal box was erected south of the station building at the end of the platform. This has since been demolished.
In the late 1980s, the up platform was shortened.
The station is no longer staffed. In recent times the station building was used for housing a community group, Bicycle SA (1996-circa 2004). The building is owned and managed by the City of Adelaide.
Read more about this topic: North Adelaide Railway Station
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)