Rosstown Railway
The Rosstown Railway was a private railway in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, running between the current railway stations of Elsternwick, on the Sandringham line, and Oakleigh, on the Pakenham line. The line was built in the late 19th century by William Murray Ross, with the intention of transporting sugar beet to his sugar beet mill, and the refined product to the Port of Melbourne. When the mill failed to begin production, the line fell into disrepair without being used, and it was eventually dismantled, with the land being sold.
History
Beginnings
William Murray Ross was a local entrepreneur and land owner, who was active on the Caulfield Council during the 1860s. He is most often remembered as the man who conceived of the ambitious, and ultimately unsuccessful, Rosstown Project. This consisted of a large-scale sugar beet processing mill, a railway line to serve it, and a residential estate, named after Ross. In 1875, Ross circulated a broadsheet proposal which detailed the project, and began building the mill that same year.Approval for the line
Also in 1875, Ross began to seek government approval for a railway to run to the site of his sugar mill from Elsternwick railway station, which was part of the Melbourne and Hobson's Bay United Railway Company system. That proposal was rejected and Ross submitted a new one in 1876, this time with the railway to extend past the mill to Oakleigh, which had no rail connection to Melbourne. At the time, a railway to Gippsland was being planned, and with many interested and influential parties involved, the proposal had been a lengthy political saga.The new Gippsland line was originally planned to run from Elsternwick to Gippsland, using the existing M&HBUR line from Elsternwick to Melbourne. However, the M&HBUR wanted to charge an exorbitant fee for running rights over its tracks, and so eventually it was decided that the railway to Gippsland would link with a station to be built at Oakleigh. While it might have been beneficial to join the Elsternwick and new Gippsland railways with Ross's cross-suburban line, its difficult negotiations with the M&HBUR made the Victorian government hesitant to allow another private railway, and Ross's scheme did not gain approval.
When Graham Berry became Premier of Victoria in 1877, he appointed John Woods, one of Ross' parliamentary supporters, as Minister of Railways. In July of the same year, a group of members of the Victorian Legislative Assembly visited the sugar works and were impressed with the progress of construction. As a result, a select committee was set up to properly investigate the Rosstown Railway proposal. It produced a very favourable report on 8 August 1877. Due to the dispute over the purchase of the M&HBUR by the State of Victoria, many more members of government, included Woods, had become wary of privately owned railways. The result was over twelve months of inaction. However, on 16 October 1878, the bill allowing construction of the Rosstown Railway was passed by the Legislative Assembly. On 14 November it passed all stages in the Legislative Council, and received Royal Assent. One of the stipulations of the bill was that the line was to be completed within five years. On 2 April 1879, the Oakleigh to Gippsland railway was opened.
Construction
By the time the "Rosstown Junction Railway Act" had been passed, Ross was already in debt and was struggling to raise the capital required to begin construction of the railway. He raised six thousand pounds through the Bank of New Zealand and work finally began in 1883, with the first rails being laid in November. Ross used iron rails from the Victorian Railways which, although lighter than steel rails, were cheaper. The Railways co-operated further by building the Elsternwick and Oakleigh junctions at each end of the new line. However Ross clashed with Railways over the Mordialloc line crossing. Ross planned for a simple flat crossing, but the Victorian Railways refused to allow it. Ross had originally owned the land where the crossing was to be, but had sold it to the Victorian Railways, most likely in an attempt to garner favour.With the five-year deadline of the act only a matter of weeks away, Ross had no time to continue the argument. Construction became frantic and many corners were cut to save time. Sleepers were laid on raw earth, and were set apart, instead of the standard of the time. In some places the sleepers had settled into the earth so far that they did not even touch the rails, and when the supply of the sleepers ran out, posts from nearby fences were used. The last section of track was laid after sunset on the last day of the five-year period in 1883. Ross had received permission to exclude the contentious Mordialloc line crossing, which was still missing, and so construction was technically completed within the set time. The Mordialloc line had opened two years previously, with a temporary crossing over the Rosstown railway.
An article in The Argus described the scene in 1884:
Reconstruction
In early 1884, Ross flirted with the idea of extending his railway from Elsternwick to the shore of Port Phillip Bay at Elwood, and then north to St Kilda, over the Elwood Swamp. Though it received support from Elwood and St Kilda locals, the idea did not get far. Ross then sought another five-year extension to his rights under the 1878 Act. This was granted, the new act being given Royal Assent on 12 December 1884.However, with his already substantial debt, Ross offered the railway for sale to the Victorian Railways for an unknown sum. When that was rejected, Ross reduced the price two months later to £25,000, and then dropped it to £20,000 a week after that. The Victorian Railways Commissioners were pushing for the State to own all railways, and a purchase bill was submitted to Parliament. However the bill was withdrawn when it was successfully argued that it was too great a risk to buy a poorly constructed railway that was not even operating. By the end of 1885, already two years into his five-year extension, Ross became resigned to the fact that he was going to have to construct the line properly.
With credit running out, Ross carried out the reconstruction when he could, but it was soon obvious that he was not going to meet the new deadline. There another setback in 1886 when an agreement was reached with the Victorian Railways about raising the Mordialloc line to cross the Rosstown Line on a bridge. Ross was to arrange and pay for the necessary work, with the Victorian Railways reimbursing him two-thirds of the cost upon completion. Initially, to keep expenditure down, Ross planned to provide a simple wooden bridge, but that was unacceptable to the Railways, and a tender was advertised to have an engineering firm design and construct an iron bridge. The total project cost came to £5,850. The single-track bridge was opened on 17 June 1887, and widened to a double-track one in 1888.
On 17 November 1888, the last day of the five-year extension, the Rosstown Railway line reconstruction was still not finished. Ross wrote to the Victorian Railways telling them that the line would be completed in approximately three months, after which he would settle the many and various outstanding debts he had with them.
Rolling stock
Although the Rosstown Railway has become infamous as an abject failure, the tracks were used from time to time. Construction and ballast trains were often on the line in the late 1880s and early 1890s, hauled by Victorian Railways locomotives that had been hired by Ross. The largest of these was a Y-class locomotive that was used on ballasting runs. Tenders had been let for the construction of rolling stock to be used by Ross, but nothing ever came of those.As for passenger trains, authors of the Rosstown Historical Research Group's book, Return to Rosstown, note:
As far as is known, the last locomotive-hauled train was a ballast train run on 21 March 1891.
Decline
Although there were severe financial penalties for missing the deadline, these were never enforced, even with Ross' history of financial troubles with the Victorian Railways. Some historians say that this was because the 1880s saw a land boom in Melbourne and its rapidly expanding suburban areas, and the consequent increase in the value of any land served by rail was eagerly anticipated. Ross still hoped to complete his Rosstown Project, even though the mill had been sitting dormant for many years, full of equipment that had never been used, minus a few losses to burglary in 1889.During the 1890s, Ross continued to try and recover financially, setting up companies from which to hide debt and obtain more credit, none of which were successful. He tried several times to sell the Rosstown Railway to the Victorian Railways, but with the 1890s depression that followed the boom of the previous decade, no-one saw any future for a line that crossed empty paddocks and would see no real traffic.
Ross held onto the line until his death in 1904. His failed sugar beet mill, which had been known for many years as "Ross' Folly", was demolished in 1908.
End of the line
The National Bank of Australasia offered the line at auction in 1906, with a reserve set at £20,000, but there were no takers. Thomas Bent made an offer of £17,000, which the Bank was ready to agree to when Bent withdrew. In 1911 the Gardenvale and East Elsternwick Progress Association approached the National Bank and negotiated a price in the hope of re-opening the line, with the support of the City of Caulfield. A survey of the line estimated that the cost of repairing and reopening it would be more than £60,000. With no hope of raising that much capital, the idea was abandoned.Five years later, the Caulfield Council asked the government to repeal the two Rosstown Junction Railway Acts and that was done in December 1916. Legally, the Rosstown Railway no longer existed. The rails were pulled up and sold to the Emu Bay Railway in Tasmania. The National Bank began to dispose of the land in 1910, but is wasn't until 1946 that the last portion was disposed of. The Caulfield Council was among the purchasers, turning some of the railway reserve into roads, and what is now Ormond Park, as well as the site of a rubbish tip and incinerator.