Hi there, in this video I'm going to talk about a really remarkable survivor, a living piece of
Melbourne's history that continues to exist in the 21st century against all odds.
This is the Eltham trestle bridge, the only remaining wooden bridge on the Victorian railway network.
And it's not out of sight on some distant country branchline,
but on a busy electrified Melbourne suburban line. In the early days of the state railway system,
the Victorian Railways built hundreds of timber trestle bridges to broadly similar designs.
Many still exist in various states of abandonment, or on rail trails, and several are still in use
carrying trains on heritage railways, most notably the Victorian Goldfields Railway
and of course Puffing Billy.
But the bridge at Eltham is truly unique. It's located on the suburban Hurstbridge line,
and still sees very intensive use, carrying roughly 120 electric suburban trains every weekday,
and almost as many on weekends. If you want a very large but fairly meaningless number to think
about, that's about 200,000 tonnes worth of train crossing over each week, not including passengers.
In a second I'm going to talk about the unique set of circumstances that have allowed this
bridge to survive into the modern world, and why it isn't going anywhere any time soon,
but first let's take a bit of a look at the bridge itself. It's about 195m long,
and consists of 38 spans. It's mostly straight, with a slight curve at the Down end.
The railway here opened in 1902, so at the time of writing I could say the bridge is 120 years old,
however it's a bit more complicated than that. Obviously timber doesn't last forever when it's
out in the elements and holding up trains every day, so individual bits of wood are
replaced as necessary on a regular basis. The good news is that most of these bits
of wood are date stamped, so it's quite easy to work out the age of individual elements.
While the bridge has never been fully replaced in one go, I am quite confident in saying there are
no original timber pieces left, so it's not quite right to describe it as 120 years old. So then,
given the presence of the date stamps, how old is the oldest bit? Well back in 2011 I had a pretty
thorough look and was able to find one piece from August 1915, and quite a few from the early 1940s.
In the decade since then maintenance has become much more regular, and today the oldest visible
piece I can find is from 1941. It's also possible to see when major renewal work took place,
when a certain date is especially widespread. There are quite a lot of bits dated from 1941,
all cross pieces under the deck – I'm not sure what the technical term for those is.
I also noticed quite a lot of pilings towards the Up end of the bridge are from 1968 and 69.
And of course the dates continue, right up to the most recent 2020s replacements.
One thing I noticed just recently, is that they've started renewing some of the older
date stamps to make them easier to read – and this should be very helpful in years to come.
It's important to note that the bridge isn't entirely wooden – there are four slightly longer
spans in the middle, including the span over the Diamond Creek, which are steel girders, though
still with a wooden deck. There are also a handful of places where timber parts were awkwardly
replaced with steel parts – I assume this happened back before the bridge was heritage listed.
One of the main steel girders has this faint lettering which says.. something.. St Kilda,
12.. 42. Presumably that's the date these girders replaced the original timber ones.
A natural characteristic of wooden bridges is that they are quite flexible, and you can actually see
the spans bending under the weight of trains quite easily with the naked eye. This may look a bit
alarming, but is of course perfectly safe – trains have been doing this for 120 years after all.
Partly due to this flexibility, the bridge has a very distinctive ride quality,
and trains – especially X'trapolis trains – wobble quite significantly on the curved section.
The track on the bridge is also a rare remanent section of jointed rail,
which contributes to its distinctive soundscape – namely what is known in technical terms as, the
'clickity-clack' – something which has disappeared from just about everywhere else in the state.
I'm not sure if there's a specific reason welded rail hasn't been installed here, but it's probably
not a coincidence that it's the bit over this bridge which hasn't been upgraded.
Many Eltham people will tell you they never have trouble waking up from a nap before their station, because
the sound and feeling of crossing the bridge are unmistakable even with your eyes closed.
There is a 40km/h speed limit over the bridge, although given its position between two curves
which also have 40km/h limits, it isn't really possible to go any faster anyway.
While the Diamond Creek normally runs through a channel passing through just a single span,
and can easily be jumped over in summer, during occasional floods it can get much higher,
and in extremely rare occasions the entire length of the bridge
can be in water. This photo was taken in March 2010 just as a flood was receding.
So the burning question is, why on earth has this bridge survived into the modern era,
and why are there no plans to replace it? Well, in the 1980s the Victorian Railways did want to
replace the bridge, and planned to fill most of it to form an embankment – which was standard
practice at the time and done to countless other bridges. However the Eltham locals of the day
understood the bridge was historic, and organised a protest to let the VR know how they felt. Now it
might be easy to view this as a regular old case of NIMBYism, but the reality is that the trestle
bridge is a prominent local landmark, and people like it! That sentiment has continued to this day,
and the bridge was heritage listed in 1998. The bridge is nestled in-between Alastair Knox Park
and the Eltham footy oval, and is also very close to the Eltham library. Its unobtrusive design
makes it fit into this landscape really well, and it's undeniably an iconic part of the local scene.
Eltham is home to a lot of artists, and a lot of people who care about local history,
so it's not surprising that of all places, this happened here. Politicians are well aware of the
sentiment surrounding the bridge, and know it would be political suicide to plan a replacement today.
In fact when the recent partial duplication of the line from Greensborough was announced,
the press release was very quick to assure the public that the bridge wouldn't be touched.
Given the bridge has been retained essentially for aesthetic reasons, it's always slightly annoyed me
that very little care is taken with the appearance of the surrounding area – the railways often dump
stuff around and underneath it, and these two very ugly maintenance depots were built right next to
it. The bridge also received these steel handrails in the late 90s, which – safety issues aside –
didn't do much for the bridge's appearance. But overall it's still an attractive area.
So having this bridge still carrying commuter trains in the modern world is pretty amazing,
and that isn't going to change any time soon – at least, not in the foreseeable future.
It's a great example of something that's technically completely impractical, surviving just because
it contributes to a nice public space, and I think that's a good thing. It's inevitable that further
duplication will threaten it one day, but in my personal opinion leaving a short single track
section here of just a few hundred metres would be a perfectly acceptable outcome, unless we get to a
point where Eltham needs a 2 or 3 minute frequency – an extremely unlikely situation at this stage.
I've personally spent a lot of time around this bridge, passing both over and under
it many hundreds of times, and probably will do so hundreds of times more! Thanks for watching!