In August of last year, it was announced that The University of Sydney would be working with the NSW Government to build a metro stop for our Camperdown campus. While the idea would ease the burden of commuters from taking the Redfern Run or a flurry of outgoing buses from Central, the focus has been concentrated on much more pressing needs, such as the lack of concession Opal cards for International students. It is absurd that USyd has been kept out of arm’s reach from railway stations for so long, especially considering UTS’ close proximity to Central, or UNSW having their very own light rail stop. What this also raises is the curious history between the railways and universities.
When railways were first emerging across England, ushering in rapid economic and industrial expansion, many towns were faced with the question of whether to adopt this burgeoning technology and allow the permanent way to run through their homestead. Paul Hastings, in his book Railroads: An International History, describes how “[s]ome towns for reasons which they lived to regret kept the main lines away”. He goes on to assert that “Oxford and Cambridge kept the new invention a safe distance from their colleges, while the snobbery of Eton College prevented the building of a station a mile away at Slough.”
While Hastings does not prescribe a reason for why Oxford and Cambridge would keep the railways away, besides general “snobbery”, Simon Bradley asserts it is due to an Anglican paternalism in his book The Railways: Nation, Network & People.
Bradley hints at some pervading fears and “donnish anxieties” at the Colleges over the railways as carrying some “unsettling influences”. “The universities already had their own policemen or bulldogs, who did their best to keep undergraduates away from taverns and loose townswomen; now these policemen could claim the right of entry to the railways too.” It seems ‘Cops off Campus’ has always been an issue, as these brutish police officers employed by the Uni were empowered to “bar from travel for a period of twenty-four hours […] any member below the rank of Master of Arts, Bachelor of Civil Law or Bachelor of Medicine”. Oxford undergraduates were also only permitted to travel to certain select stations and pre-approved destinations so the university could steer them clear of risky destinations such as racecourses and the like. These overbearing fears led to Cambridge pulling strings to have the station built over a mile away from the town, much to the chagrin of the general public ever since.
There also existed the question of Sunday travel. At Cambridge, “the railway would be fined £5 every time it transported a passenger to or from [the town], or anywhere within a three-mile radius, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on the Sabbath.” Soon after the line opened, however, the railway companies began offering cheap day and excursion train tickets, bringing more tourists from London to Cambridge. The Vice-Chancellor argued “Sunday excursions were ‘as distasteful to the University Authorities as they must be offensive to Almighty God and to all right-minded Christians’.” This position was yielded as time went on, however, and Cambridge went on to become a major junction.
It is not all butting heads, however. Cambridge University Press benefitted from the emergence of rail and conversely the electric telegraph. Once paying five shillings a ton in the eighteenth century “for the transport of its paper by means of a roundabout water route”, the railways equalised rates so that “Cambridge’s printing house could compete effectively for business from outside its parent university, on which the best profits were to be made.” At the same time, the railways helped supply medical schools with cadavers. Trains arriving in Cambridge brought pauper corpses from the workhouse, bodies of men and women who died in destitution wherein the government ruled they had forfeited the right to a normal burial. They were then brought to the Anatomy School in town.
Similar to England, the University of Sydney had been built prior to the erection of railway stations that could conceivably run through or near the campus. While I found no evidence to suggest USyd purposely kept the construction of Central and Redfern stations away from campus, perhaps the Uni’s close aesthetic ties to the campuses of old such as Oxford and Cambridge had some sort of pervading influence in the attitudes of the time.
No matter the reasons, USyd students have still had plenty to say about the railways themselves. A special careers edition of Honi Soit from 1970 advertised the various jobs one could get in the railway industry. A feature article in 1971 headlines “AUSTRALIA’S TRANSPORT CRISIS (A legacy of the past — A problem for the future)”.
In 1974, an article titled “public transport action day” alerted students to an upcoming protest on August 1st in Hyde Park. Preceding the protest, the NSW Government released the Nielsen Report which envisaged a solution to Sydney’s road congestion being an expansion of “expressways and highways from now until the year 2000.” Meanwhile, railway funding would be slashed and bus services cut, and simultaneously fares would be raised and staff reduced. Writer Dave McKnight asserts that “the emphasis on expressways and the motor-car is possibly the stupidest thing that could be done”, and suggests that those protesting are not “a bunch of wild-eyed radicals, but a group containing representatives of many trade unions involving transport”, with meetings planned by “shop-stewards, students from universities and teachers colleges and union officials”.
Looking back at the history of universities and the railways, stories waxed and waned between historical artefact and the maddeningly familiar. This relationship is always changing, intertwining politics, education and geographic proximity. Who knows what new stories a metro stop may bring. I know I’ll be tapping in.
