The Silent Princes Bridge Station: How One Company Demolished Australia's Forgotten Railway Station

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]1979.

[00:00:02]You are 15 years old. You catch the train at Hurstbridge or Eping or North Coat. The old Tate Red Rattler shutters into the platform and you step off into a smell of diesel and brake dust and the cold metal of the rails.

[00:00:18]Then comes the ramp. Steep bitmen curving up toward the city. Arcade shops on both sides. A snack stall with upturned glass cordial bottles. Lime, raspberry, the smell of pasties from the cafeteria.

[00:00:34]Central Station Records on the right. A teenager named Joe Srian opened it that year. At the top of the ramp, you arrive in town. The rooftop deck looks across the Golamont yards to the MCG.

[00:00:47]Saturday afternoon, VL crowds racing for trains to Victoria Park. Today, there is no ramp. There is only one silent brick signal box that nobody notices.

[00:01:01]Chapter one, the forgotten station.

[00:01:04]Most Melbourneians do not know it existed.

[00:01:08]Ask them how many founding railway stations the city had and they will say two. Flender Street and Spencer Street.

[00:01:16]Those are the famous ones. The clocks, the Yellowstone, the MacArthur arrival, the PPP scandal of 2002. two stations.

[00:01:25]The answer is three.

[00:01:28]There was a third.

[00:01:30]It opened on the 8th of February, 1859, the same day as Spencer Street. It stood at the corner of Flender Street and Swansston Street on the southern bank of the Yara. Looking across at St. Paul's Cathedral, it fed directly into the busiest railway corner on Earth. It survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the postwar migrant boom, and the entire 20th century rise of Melbourne. And then it disappeared so completely that 15 separate commenters on a single YouTube video posted in 2019 wrote the same words underneath it. I didn't know it existed. Its name was Prince's Bridge Station, Australia's third founding city station. And here is the truly strange part of the story you are about to hear. It was not demolished once, it was demolished twice. And what was built on top of it the first time was so universally hated that 30 years later, Melbourne demolished that, too.

[00:02:33]The station underneath is gone. The towers above are gone. The ramp in between is gone.

[00:02:41]Today, there is Federation Square. There is an art gallery basement. There are escalators that go up and down and do not smell of pasties.

[00:02:51]And at the eastern end of platform 16, ignored by 200,000 daily commuters who walk within a few meters of it every working day of their lives, stands a small utilitarian brick box called Flender Street Dignal Box. That signal box is the last surviving physical fragment of 137 years of railway.

[00:03:15]The historian Robin Anir, who would later write the definitive book on Melbourne's demolition decades, put it like this. By the 1960s, watching the wreckers at work in Melbourne was a free circus act. People made an afternoon of it. This is the story of the station that was demolished while the audience cheered. Three founding stations, two demolitions, one survivor, and the company that bought it all for £5 million.

[00:03:43]Chapter 2, the private gamble.

[00:03:47]To understand how Prince's bridge station was forgotten, you have to understand that it was never supposed to be government property in the first place. It was a punt, a private speculation, a 19th century gamble on whether Melbourne could be persuaded to ride a train. The Melbourne and Suburban Railway Company opened the original timber terminus on the southern bank of the Yara on the 8th of February 1859.

[00:04:13]Same day as Spencer Street, but a separate company, a separate line, a separate dream.

[00:04:21]A modest wooden platform, a small engine shed to the east, a ticket booth.

[00:04:26]The line ran south to Punt Road in Richmond and then to South Yara. and within months it was extended to Praan.

[00:04:35]By the following year it reached Windsor.

[00:04:39]That route, that early colonial speculation is the line you ride today as the Sandringham service.

[00:04:47]But the gamble did not pay. The private companies fought one another, undercut one another, ran out of capital.

[00:04:57]In 1862, the Melbourne and Suburban was absorbed by the Melbourne Railway Company.

[00:05:04]In 1864, three operators were folded together into the Melbourne and Hobson's Bay United Railway Company, which now owned the line, the platform, and the rolling stock. And then in October 1865 came the first death.

[00:05:22]The tracks were rerouted under Swanston Street and threaded directly into Flender Street.

[00:05:29]Prince's Bridge station was closed. The wooden terminus was abandoned. The platforms became freight sightings.

[00:05:37]14 years dark.

[00:05:40]14 years forgotten.

[00:05:42]14 years while Melbourne boomed on gold money and built itself into a marvelous city and the platforms on the yara sat behind a fence collecting weeds and pigeon mess. In 1878, the colonial government bought out the private operators. The whole tangled mess of 19th century railway companies became crown property under the Victorian railways.

[00:06:06]And the men in the new department looking at a map of the city saw an unused asset, a platform, a river crossing, a site. On the 2nd of April 1879, Prince's Bridge station was reopened.

[00:06:23]this time as the city terminus of an entirely new line. The Gibsland Railway, east to Sale, east to Bansdale, east to the dairy country and the brown coal country and the timber country. The forgotten platform was suddenly the gateway to a quarter of Victoria. That is the moment the station found its job.

[00:06:49]From 1879 onward, Prince's Bridge was the place country trains terminated. The place hot, dusty travelers stepped off after a day on the rails. The place the Gibsland Mail arrived and the eastern suburban services were marshaled. Within a generation, it would feed directly into the busiest railway corner on Earth. But first, it needed somebody to build it properly. Somebody who knew what a railway station was supposed to look like.

[00:07:18]Chapter 3. The Eling rebuild.

[00:07:22]His name was Frederick Carl Eling.

[00:07:26]He was born in Kreswick on the 20th of July 1860, the son of a German immigrant. By the time he was 26, he had become the first Australian chess champion. By the time he was 40, he was superintendent engineer of the way and works branch at the Victorian railways.

[00:07:44]He is one of the most consequential engineers in Melbourne's history. Most Melbourneians have never heard his name.

[00:07:51]Eling designed the Flender Street Vioaduct, the elevated railway link that joined Spencer Street to Flender Street across the western edge of the city.

[00:08:01]Construction began in 1891.

[00:08:04]By December 1894, it was carrying passenger services.

[00:08:09]He laid the last brick on the Flender Street clock tower in 199 and in the years that followed between 199 and 1915 he rebuilt Prince's Bridge station to the form that older Melbourneians remember.

[00:08:26]It was not Flender Street. It was not a Yellowstone Eduwardian Palace with a clock tower and a row of clocks announcing the lines. It was working railway architecture.

[00:08:37]red brick, an island platform, a separate signal house at the eastern end, a configuration of three suburban platforms, and what was called platform 1 east, threaded directly into the rebuilt Flender Street operations so seamlessly that by the 1920s, commuters could not tell where one station ended and the other began. In 191, a direct line had already been opened from Prince's Bridge north to Clifton Hill, feeding the Hurst Bridge and what would become the Eping services. The station that had begun as a private gamble was now the terminus of three of Melbourne's longest, fastest growing suburban lines.

[00:09:20]The Eling rebuild prepared it for the traffic that was coming. And then in 1917, before the work was even properly settled into the city's daily rhythm, Frederick Carl Eling resigned from the Victorian railways. The records are quiet on the reason, but biographers note that he believed he had not been fairly treated on promotion. The man who built the city's most important railway infrastructure walked out the door over a piece of bureaucratic injustice. He lived another 38 years. He died at Box Hill on the 31st of July 1955 at the age of 95.

[00:10:00]He is buried without much fanfare. The station he had built was at that point the eastern apron of what one Melbourne newspaper had already declared the busiest railway station on the planet.

[00:10:13]This is the part the audience never hears.

[00:10:17]Eling built it in red brick.

[00:10:20]Eling built the vioideuct.

[00:10:23]Eling laid the clock tower's last brick.

[00:10:26]Then Eling walked away and his red brick at Prince's Bridge would stand for 49 years before the wreckers arrived.

[00:10:36]Chapter 4. The world's busiest station.

[00:10:40]On the 11th of January 1922, the Argus newspaper of Melbourne published a story under a headline that if you grew up here, ought to be on a plaque on the wall of Federation Square.

[00:10:54]World's busiest station.

[00:10:57]Subheading: Flender Street Daily Record.

[00:11:02]200,000 passengers, 1,500 trains.

[00:11:07]Read that twice.

[00:11:09]200,000 passengers in a single day, 1,500 trains in a single day. By the following year, 1923, the daily figure had climbed again to a reputed 2,300 train movements and around 300,000 passengers.

[00:11:29]There is debate about whether Flender Street ever truly was the busiest passenger station in the world or whether it was the busiest in the British Empire or simply the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere by a country mile.

[00:11:44]The figures are real. The exact global ranking is the kind of thing engineers in retirement homes still argue about.

[00:11:53]What is not in dispute is that the suburban platforms numbered 14, 15, and 16, the Prince's Bridge platforms, funneled directly into that throughput.

[00:12:05]Prince's Bridge was the eastern engine of the busiest railway corner on Earth.

[00:12:11]The man who had built that traffic was Harold Winthrop Clap, chairman of the Victorian Railways Commissioners from 1920 to 1951.

[00:12:21]American-born, Australianbred, ferocious, brilliant, impatient. From 1919, he drove suburban electrification at a pace that exhausted his staff and embarrassed his peers. On the 11th of April, 1926, the only Westinghouse 55 lever power frame ever used in Victoria, was commissioned at Flender Street Dignal Box, the same brick box that today stands silent at the end of platform 16.

[00:12:50]3 weeks later on the 3rd of May 1926, Clap inaugurated the Jalong Flyer.

[00:12:57]Locomotive A2906 departed Flender Street platform 1 at 9:00 in the morning. It arrived in Jalong at 10, 67 minutes.

[00:13:10]In December 1935, Claps Railways introduced Australia's first airconditioned passenger carriage, carriage 36A.

[00:13:19]And on the 17th of November 1937, in front of 300 guests at Spencer Street, Premier Albert Dunston turned a gold key in the door of the parlor car of the Spirit of Progress. Regular service began 6 days later. Built entirely at the Newport workshops by Australian workmen, mostly from Australian materials, the Spirit was the most beautiful train in the Southern Hemisphere. It blasted past the Prince's Bridge platforms at 79 1/2 mph, twice a day, every day. Workingass boys at the rail fence on Punt Road counted the carriages. 300,000 passengers a day. The busiest railway corner on Earth. and in 15 years it would be at war. Chapter 5, the Yanks at Platform 16. On the 15th of February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese army. 85,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops were marched into captivity.

[00:14:21]The defensive ring around Australia broke open in a single afternoon. The country was on its own. 5 weeks later on the 20th of March 1942, General Douglas MacArthur stood on the platform of Teroy Railway Station in South Australia.

[00:14:39]He had been ordered out of the Philippines.

[00:14:43]He gave a short statement to the journalists who had been waiting.

[00:14:47]I came through and I shall return.

[00:14:52]That night, his special carriage was attached to the Melbourne Express and ran east through the desert. At about 9 on the morning of the 21st of March 1942, the train pulled into Spencer Street. MacArthur stepped down to a 360 strong United States Honor Guard, an Australian Army band, and the Australian Minister for the Army, Frank Ford. The crowd was reported at 6,000.

[00:15:19]He moved to his offices at 401 Colin Street, what became known as the Batan Building. By June of that year, there were 30,000 American servicemen in Melbourne. Most of them came in through the Seawwood gates. They disembarked at Station Pier and Prince's Pier in Port Melbourne, climbed into the suburban trains, transferred at Flender Street, and walked out across the steel deck plates of platforms 14, 15, and 16, the Prince's Bridge platforms.

[00:15:51]From there, they fanned out across the city. Camp Pel at Royal Park, named for Major Floyd Pel, killed defending Darwin.

[00:16:01]Camp Murphy at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Forner Park, Port Melbourne, University High School. The cricket ground was full of American tents and American boots. The trains that took them there came through Prince's Bridge.

[00:16:15]On the 1st of December 1942, a fight broke out at the corner of Flender Street and Elizabeth Street, a few meters from the western entrance of the station between American and Australian servicemen. The crowd at one point exceeded a thousand spectators. Order was restored without fatalities.

[00:16:36]On the 13th of February 1943, a larger brawl broke out across the city blocks immediately north. The Melbourne incidents are sometimes confused with the deadlier battle of Brisbane of November 1942.

[00:16:51]They were not the same.

[00:16:54]Nobody died in Melbourne.

[00:16:56]But the trains kept running.

[00:16:59]Inside the signal boxes and on the ticket gates, the names on the rosters had begun to change. Women had joined the Victorian railways.

[00:17:09]conductors, porters, signal box assistants, ticket collectors. Flender Street Debox and the Prince's Bridge platforms were among the workplaces they staffed. They held the railway together while their husbands were in New Guinea.

[00:17:25]30,000 American troops walked across platform 16 in 1942.

[00:17:31]22 years later, the platform itself would be on the auction block.

[00:17:36]Chapter 6. the ramp years.

[00:17:40]From the end of the war, the migrants began to arrive. Italians, Greeks, Yuguslavs, Dutch, Maltese, Poles, 10B passages, and assisted ones, families and single men and exhausted widows.

[00:17:56]They came in through Station Pier and Prince's Pier in Port Melbourne, exactly as the American servicemen had come in four years earlier. Only this time, the ships were Italian and British and carried suitcases instead of duffel bags. Prince's Pier was their door into Australia from 1915 until it closed in 1969.

[00:18:19]They climbed into the Port Melbourne electric trains transferred at Flender Street and stepped onto the Prince's Bridge platforms with everything they owned in two hands. From 1949, Snowy Mountain scheme laborers transited the same way on their way north to the dam projects.

[00:18:39]The rolling stock they rode was the inheritance of the clap electrification.

[00:18:45]The Tate carriages, the woodenbodied cars introduced in 1910 as steamhauled and electrified from 1919 onward, named after Sir Thomas Tate, came to be called the Red Rattlers. They were drafty in winter and stifling in summer and made a sound at speed like a tin shed being shaken by an angry man. From 1956 onward, they began to be replaced by the Harris Blue Trains. 30 steelbodied sets entered service between 1956 and 1959, named after Norman C. Harris, a former chairman of commissioners.

[00:19:25]On Saturday afternoons, the trains from Princess Bridge ran north through Clifton Hill to Victoria Park to drop off the Carlton and Collingwood crowds.

[00:19:35]And here is what the audience remembers.

[00:19:37]Not the platforms, not the timetable, the ramp.

[00:19:43]You came up the steep Bmen incline from the platforms towards Swanston Street.

[00:19:48]Arcade shops on both sides. Snack stalls with the upturned glass cordial bottles.

[00:19:54]Lime raspberry. A glass n rolling slowly with a cold metal tap at the bottom. The cafeteria where the foots gray technical apprentices ate before night classes at Corfield. The smell of pasties and break dust and damp wool coats in winter. the rooftop deck where a kid on a Saturday could lean against the railing and look out east across the Golamont Marshalling yards toward the Melbourne cricket ground. From up there, you could see the whole working spine of the city laid out in steel and timber. In 1979, a Glenn Waverly commuter named Joe Sebrien opened a record shop in the arcade on the Flender Street frontage. He was a finance clerk who had decided one morning that he had had enough of being a finance clerk. He paid $50 to a French h highidleberg-based graphic artist for a logo that resembled the London Underground Round. He named the shop Central Station Records because he said all the great cities of the world have Central Stations. A teenager could go up the ramp on a Saturday and find imported records that Brashes did not even know existed.

[00:21:07]Joe Sebrien named his shop after the central stations of the world. He did not know the station under his feet had already been sold.

[00:21:16]Chapter 7. Bolters's 5 million.

[00:21:20]The man who sold it was Sir Henry Edward Balte.

[00:21:25]Born 20th of May 1908 in Bellerat East, the son of a rural publican.

[00:21:32]Premier of Victoria from the 7th of June 1955 to the 23rd of August 1972.

[00:21:39]6,287 days in office. The longest tenure of any premier in Victorian history. Six election wins Liberal and Country Party.

[00:21:50]pro-development, pro-private investment, anti-UN, and unrepentant capital punishment proponent who would oversee the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967.

[00:22:02]A man who treated state debt as a tool to facilitate private capital rather than spend government money. He liked deals.

[00:22:12]In 1963, he announced the deal. It was called the Prince's Gate Development Scheme. The number attached to it was £5 million.

[00:22:22]The mechanism was new and clever and it would set the template for every airright selloff in Australian history.

[00:22:30]Balty was not selling the railway.

[00:22:33]Balty was selling the air above the railway. The Victorian railways would keep the platforms. A private developer would buy the sky.

[00:22:44]The plan was two 17story office blocks, a public plaza at street level, a retail arcade, split level parking for 186 cars, and a new entrance to the suburban platforms below. Press coverage of the announcement spoke of an ultramodern gateway to the city. The southern bank of the Yara would be transformed into a forward-looking civic statement.

[00:23:10]St. Paul's Cathedral would have a partner across the river. The colonial era was over and the future was steel and brown brick. There was no public consultation. There was no heritage review. There could not have been a heritage review because the Heritage Council of Victoria would not exist until 1974.

[00:23:32]The Esling Red brick that had stood since 1915 had no statutory protection of any kind. The platforms underneath, almost 100 years old, had no statutory protection of any kind. The state government owned the asset. The state government could sell it. The climate was not unusual. 12 months earlier in 1962, Balti's Minister for Transport had signed an even more ambitious deal with a different developer to demolish the Flender Street clock tower itself and replace it with a 60story office tower.

[00:24:08]That deal lapsed for separate reasons.

[00:24:12]Only the lapse saved the most photographed building in Melbourne. The Prince's Bridge deal did not lapse. It was the model.

[00:24:21]The state of Victoria had decided that what stood on the corner of Flenders and Swansston was inventory, not heritage, not history.

[00:24:30]Inventory. The £5 million went into the treasury. The esling red brick went into the dust. And here is the part the audience never quite gets to in the press releases. The buyer was not the Victorian government. The buyer was not the Victorian railways. The buyer was one company, a company that nobody in Melbourne could quite place. A company with two headquarters, one in Sydney and one in London.

[00:24:59]Chapter 8. The One Company.

[00:25:02]The name of the company was Prince's Gate Thai Luted. It was a joint venture registered for this specific purpose, two shareholders.

[00:25:13]The first was a Sydney firm called Lend Lease Corporation Limited, founded on the 11th of September 1958 by a Dutch civil engineer named Geradis Yosef Dosseldorp.

[00:25:25]Everyone called him Dick. He had arrived in Australia in March 1951 to set up an Australian arm for the Dutch construction firm Berto Baladr.

[00:25:36]He had stayed. He had built lend lease from a finance arm into one of the dominant property and construction businesses in the southern hemisphere.

[00:25:46]The same year the Prince's Gate Towers were completed, 1967, Lend Lease completed Australia Square in Sydney.

[00:25:54]50 stories, 170 m, designed by Harry Sidler with the Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nurvy.

[00:26:05]At completion, it was the world's tallest lightweight reinforced concrete building. The second shareholder was a London firm called Odonino's Property and Investment Company Limited. The Odinos were a family of Italian British resters. Their patriarch Augusta Odonino had opened a restaurant called Odonino's Imperial at 54 to62 Regent Street in London around the turn of the 20th century. The restaurant ran until 1946.

[00:26:37]The property arm held the Freehold and the family's other investments.

[00:26:42]There is no record of Odinos having any other significant Australian holding.

[00:26:48]They had walked into Australia exactly once. They walked in for the air above Prince's Bridge station. This is the line the channel knows by heart.

[00:26:58]Foreigners stole it.

[00:27:01]The Hawkbury River Railway Bridge was built by the Union Bridge Company of New York. Prince's Bridge Station was unbuilt by Odinos of London. The names change. The pattern does not. The architects were Leslie M. Parrot and partners.

[00:27:18]The lead designer was a man named David Simpson.

[00:27:22]Demolition of the Elinging Red Brick began in 1964.

[00:27:27]In December that year, new platforms and tracks were commissioned beneath the rising development. On the 27th of March 1966, the the Westinghouse 55 lever frame in Flender Street Dbox was retired and replaced by a relay interlocking.

[00:27:44]Esling's 1926 signaling went into a skip. On the 5th of September 1966, Prince's Gate Plaza was opened by Lord Mayor Ian Burair in front of a small civic crowd. Two high school students unveiled the commemorative plaque. The Canra Times of the 7th of September carried the photograph on page 15. By 1967, the two towers were completed. 17 stories, 70 m east burwood brown brick, vertical aluminium framed window strips, structural columns on a 10 m grid, 25,000 m of office space.

[00:28:28]The west tower took 10 floors of the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria. The east tower took 12 floors of the Victorian Employers Federation.

[00:28:38]to Melbourne they were the gas and fuel buildings. The heritage historian Rohan Story would later write in a Melbourne that the towers were publicly derided as the ugliest structure in Melbourne. That the worst fault was not the bland brown brick cladding but the position dominating the southern entry to the city and overshadowing the cathedral.

[00:29:00]The Australian Women's Weekly of the 5th of November 1969 carried the contemporary judgment.

[00:29:08]Once the graceful spires of St. Paul's Cathedral dominated the southern entry to Melbourne in 1967, the ultramodern twin towers of the Prince's Gate complex raised their lean, unorned 17 stories to rob strollers on the banks of the Yara of their traditional view.

[00:29:27]London Money, Sydney Muscle, Melbourne Dirt.

[00:29:34]The one company built the ugliest building in the city, and Melbourne would spend the next 30 years hating it.

[00:29:43]Chapter nine.

[00:29:45]The Hated Towers.

[00:29:47]From 1967 onward, the towers stood. They were brown. They were boxy. They were too tall and too close to the river.

[00:29:56]They blocked the view of St. Paul's spires from Prince's Bridge. They blocked the view of the city skyline from the southern bank of the Yara.

[00:30:05]Every photograph of Melbourne from the south for 30 years has them in the frame looming over the cathedral. And every photograph announces the same complaint.

[00:30:16]But underneath the towers, in the podium, in the arcade, the ramp survived. The shops survived. The cafeteria survived. The cordial bottles survived. The Footsgray apprentices kept eating their pasties on the way to nightclass at Corfield. And on Saturdays, the Carlton and Collingwood crowds still poured up the ramp towards Swanson Street with their scarves and their thermoses. In 1979, Joe Sebrien opened Central Station Records on the Flender Street frontage of the arcade and a generation of Melbond teenagers learned where to find imported 12-in dance singles.

[00:30:56]And then on the 29th of June 1980, the railway department did the quiet thing.

[00:31:04]It abolished the name.

[00:31:06]From that day forward, the three suburban platforms were simply Flender Street platforms 14, 15, and 16.

[00:31:16]The signage came down within weeks. The mention disappeared from the timetables.

[00:31:21]The station that had opened on the same day as Spencer Street in the same year as the gold rush ended was wiped from the network map of Melbourne. No press release, no civic ceremony, just a quiet administrative line through the word Prince's Bridge. On the 6th of December 1981, the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop opened. A new suburban service called the City Circle began originating from the former Prince's Bridge platforms. It ran once around the loop, stopped at every station, and came back.

[00:31:55]The Hurst Bridge, Eping and Murderline trains still terminated here. The ramp years were not over. They were getting their last decade. On the 23rd of August 1993, the City Circle Suburban Train ran for the last time. It was replaced in 1994 by the City Circle Tram, still running today.

[00:32:19]And then in 1994, a different premier with a different temperament looked at the towers and announced that they would be demolished.

[00:32:29]Jeffrey Gibb Kennet, Liberal, Premier of Victoria from October 1992 to October 1999.

[00:32:38]He looked at the brown brick monstrosity that the Balty government had let London speculators build on the corner of Flenders and Swansston, and he called it a dreadful eyes.

[00:32:48]a blot on the city. The centenery of Federation was coming in 2001 and Melbourne would have a new civic precinct to market. The Vista of St. Paul's would be restored. The cathedral would have its view back. In 1995, the Gas and Fuel Corporation of Victoria was privatized under the same Kennet government's electricity and gas reforms. The corporate tenency that had given the towers their public name was abolished. In 1996, the formal demolition announcement followed. In 1994, a Liberal premier called the gas and fuel towers a dreadful eyes saw. In 1996, he tore them down.

[00:33:34]The One Company's monument was about to follow the One Company's station into oblivion.

[00:33:40]Chapter 10.

[00:33:41]The tragic irony.

[00:33:44]There was no implosion.

[00:33:46]There was no spectacle.

[00:33:48]The prince's gate towers came down floor by floor across 1996 and 1997 because the engineers decided that explosive demolition in a dense central business district with the Flender Street platforms still operating directly underneath was an unacceptable risk.

[00:34:08]30 months of cranes and dust. The photographer Ian Harrison Hill documented the entire dismantling.

[00:34:15]His images held now in the State Library of Victoria collection under the catalog numbers H96.814 and 7 are the visual record of a Melbourne self-correction in real time.

[00:34:29]In May 1997, the railway department closed platforms 15 and 16 for the last time. The ramp went with the podium. The arcade went with the towers, the snack stalls and the cafeteria and the upturned cordial bottles and the rooftop deck overlooking the Golomont yards all went into the rubble. Joe Sean's Central Station Records was forced out of its Flender Street frontage and relocated up the hill to the City Square arcade.

[00:35:01]Platform 14 survived, accessed today via Flender Street platform 1.

[00:35:08]Sit with this for a second.

[00:35:11]The one company demolished a 49year-old Elinging Red Brick station to build the towers.

[00:35:17]30 years later, a different premere of a different government demolished the one company's towers to undo the damage. The station underneath was already gone.

[00:35:28]The towers above were now gone.

[00:35:32]The ramp in between, the only piece of architecture the audience actually remembers, was gone with the towers it had grown into. They demolished our station for towers they then demolished.

[00:35:44]On the 28th of July 1997, lab architecture studio was announced as the winner of the Federation Square design competition. Londonbased, led by the Australian Peter Davidson and the American Donald Bates.

[00:36:01]177 entries, five short-listed. In October 1998, the piling rigs went into the bank of the Yara. On the 17th of February, 20,000 Premier Steve Brader that the western shard of the new precinct be cut to no more than 8 m in height to preserve the heritage view of St. Paul's Cathedral from the river. The same view the one company had blocked in 1967.

[00:36:27]On the 26th of October 2002, Federation Square was officially opened by Premier Steve Bra, construction manager, Multiplex. Final cost approximately $467 million Australian, more than four times the original estimate of 110 million.

[00:36:46]Acme's basement gallery sits today in the void of platforms 15 and 16. Balty sold it. Kennet demolished what replaced it. Bra paved over what was left. Three premieres, three decades, three erasers and one station that nobody remembers.

[00:37:04]Chapter 11. What Melbourne lost. I am standing on the deck of Federation Square. It is a Saturday afternoon in May 2026. This is the corner where the Carlton and Collingwood crowds used to race for the trains to Victoria Park.

[00:37:20]The 1888 Princesses Bridge, currently in section bysection Bluestone Restoration, crosses the Yara to my right. Below the deck, in the basement of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the void of platforms 15 and 16 is now an art gallery. Platform 14 is still in service, accessed through Flender Street, platform 1. None of the people walking past me know any of this.

[00:37:48]There is no plaque.

[00:37:50]Australia's third founding city station has no monument. 200,000 commuters pass through this corner every working day.

[00:37:59]And not one in a thousand could tell you what stood here in 1963.

[00:38:04]At the eastern end of platform 16, ignored by all of them, the silent Flender Street D signal box stands as the last surviving fragment of 137 years of railway. The other signal boxes are gone.

[00:38:21]A burned twice and was rebuilt in 2009 as a youth art center called Signal. B and C were demolished when the Federation Square deck went over them.

[00:38:35]Only D remains.

[00:38:38]Lesson one. The air above heritage is not for sale.

[00:38:44]In 1963, Premier Henry Balty sold the sky above a 104y old railway station to a Sydney London property consortium for 5 million.

[00:38:56]There was no public consultation.

[00:38:59]There was no heritage review. The Heritage Council of Victoria would not exist for another 11 years. The Elinging Red Brick that had stood for 49 years came down inside 12 months. The audience peak, the busiest railway corner on Earth, was sold off with a single signature.

[00:39:19]Australia's heritage decades did not start with a wrecker's hammer. They started with a premier's pen, and every state in Australia watching Melbourne learned to do the same thing. Lesson two, the one company was two companies, and both are still standing. Prince's gate patai luted was a joint venture of lend lease of Sydney and Odinos of London. The same year they finished the brown brick monstrosity that ruined the view of St. Paul's lend lease finished Australia Square.

[00:39:54]Today Lendle is one of the largest property companies on the Australian stock exchange.

[00:40:00]Odinos was a family of London resters who turned Regent Street rent into Melbourne air rights.

[00:40:08]foreign money, Australian air, local memory.

[00:40:14]The pattern repeats every decade in every Australian capital. The Hawkbury River Railway Bridge was built by the Union Bridge Company of New York.

[00:40:24]Prince's Bridge Station was unbuilt by Odinos of London.

[00:40:29]The names change. The pattern doesn't.

[00:40:34]Lesson three.

[00:40:36]The ramp was the station.

[00:40:39]Ask the men who used Prince's Bridge station what they remember, and not one of them will mention the platforms. They remember the ramp, the smell of pasties, the upturned cordial bottles, the arcade shops, Central Station Records, and the teenager named Joe Sebrien, who named his shop after the great central stations of the world without knowing the station underneath him had already been sold.

[00:41:07]the cafeteria where the foots gray apprentices ate before nightclass at Cfield. The rooftop deck overlooking the Jollmont yards.

[00:41:17]That was the station, not the platforms, not the timet, the ramp. And when they demolished the towers in 1996 to restore the view of St. Paul's, they took the ramp, too.

[00:41:31]Today, there are escalators.

[00:41:34]The escalators work. They go up and they go down. They do not smell of pasties.

[00:41:41]A suburban Hurstbridge train rolls in on platform 14. The doors hiss open. Some commuters get off. Some get on. None of them look at the silent brick box at the end of the platform. And the only thing still standing from Australia's forgotten railway station is a small brick signal box that no one ever notices.