History
The line from Adelaide to Port Adelaide was the second railway in South Australia, after the Goolwa-Port Elliot railway, opened in 1854, and opened in 1856. The line operated for 60 years before today’s Port Adelaide station came to be built.
The original line from Adelaide ran directly to Port Dock station, the site now occupied by the National Railway Museum. Various lines then continued through the Port Adelaide’s streets to the wharves and, from 1878, along St Vincent Street to the seaside town of Semaphore.
Congestion at Port Dock and the delays involved in operating trains along busy streets in the centre of the Port resulted in construction of a viaduct and a new bridge across the Port River in 1916. This diverted through trains to Semaphore and Outer Harbor via a new station named Port Adelaide – Commercial Road, the current station.
Port Adelaide Commercial Road was quite a substantial building, with long platforms, an overall roof and a signal cabin. This quickly took over from Port Dock as the town’s principal railway station.
As rail traffic decreased through the 1960s and 70s, facilities at Commercial Road station were gradually reduced. In the early 1970s the roof was removed, platforms shortened and the street level station buildings reconstructed. The ticket office was closed in January 1979 and the station has been unstaffed since then.
With the closure of Port Dock in 1981, Commercial Road station became Port Adelaide.
Read more about this topic: Port Adelaide Railway Station
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“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)