Time Travellers in Essendon, Flemington and the Keilor Plains

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Park Street, Moonee Ponds Gatekeeper's Cottage

by Rod Berry

Frank and Bette Berry, who lived for a time in the Park Street, Gatekeeper's Cottage. 

Courtesy of Rod Berry.

My Family lived in the Railway Departmental Residence at the level crossing in Park St, Moonee Ponds from late 1967 to 1972. It was originally built to serve as the Gatekeeper’s residence back in the day when the gates were first installed. Although the gates had long since gone and the house was no longer required as a gatekeeper’s residence it was still in use as a residence for railway employees and their families. My father, Frank Berry, was a Ganger in the Ways and Works branch and we had transferred to Melbourne from the Wimmera in Western Victoria.

Dad was the Ganger of the Broadmeadows Standard Gauge gang between Melbourne and Seymour, somewhere between Albion and Kilmore.  I don’t believe there were any vacant DR’s available at the time and Park Street was the DR closest to Broadmeadows available. We eventually moved into a DR at Broadmeadows in 1972.

The block of land the house was on was long and narrow, sandwiched between Sherbourne St and the railway line, so the house was quite close to the railway line and all the bedrooms were on the railway line side of the house. It was a three-bedroom home with a lounge, kitchen and bathroom. The laundry and toilet were both outside in an adjacent shed with another garden shed beside that. There were double gates that gave access to the yard from Sherbourne Street. We had a veggie patch at the rear of the property which ended just short of the buffer stops of the stabling sidings. Apart from the front and back doors there was a side door off the lounge room that led to where the old gatekeeper's hut would have been, and which would have allowed the gatekeeper direct access to the gates from the lounge room.

The kitchen and main bedroom were at the front of the house and when the kitchen window was up you could smell what was being cooked from the street. The only heating in winter was the log fire in the lounge room. Cooling in summer was open windows and an electric fan in the lounge that mum and dad had bought. If a breeze was blowing the right way you could open the front and back doors and the breeze would flow through. From the bedroom windows to the fence was about a metre wide with only a pathway down the side between the house and the fence. The fence was only about 2 metres from the track. There was a drain between the fence and the edge of the track formation and that was it, nothing else. If a train had derailed on the curve, I think we might have been in a bit of trouble.

As kids we had lived all our lives beside a railway line and were used to hearing trains, but Melbourne was a lot different, we went from 3-4 trains a day to 3-4 every hour between 5 am and midnight and it took a little while to get used to it. The house windows were only single glazed, so you heard every train, and the house shook when a train went past.

Sometimes visitors would comment on the noise of trains going past, and the shaking, but by then we barely noticed it. In terms of noise the worst was when the track maintenance crews were working on the track overnight. The noise was constant and loud, and you had no choice but to put up with it. No one got much sleep on those nights! Fortunately, that didn’t happen too often.

My parents both came from large families and at Christmas time we would have Xmas parties at our house with the extended family and all my cousins would have great fun climbing up and hanging over the fence and waving to the trains as they went past. It must have been quite a sight for passengers seeing all the kids, (somewhere between 10 and 15 kids) lined up on the fence waving and cheering and so close they could almost touch our hands!

When the boom gates failed, dad would have to go out with a set of red and green flags, latch the booms up and “Flag” cars through until a repair crew arrived to fix them. Of course, that’s no longer allowed with the newer faster and more frequent trains making it too dangerous.

By the time we had moved in the house was quite old and the railways had determined that it was surplus to requirements, and it was scheduled to be demolished after we moved out. As a consequence, no work or maintenance was carried out on the house at all except for any emergency works or works to keep the place habitable. For example when we moved in to the Park St DR there was an issue with the toilet as it didn’t work properly and smelt. It took quite some time and numerous complaints before it was eventually fixed. Dad took matters into his own hands and cracked the bowl with a hammer forcing the railways department to fix it!

This lack of maintenance led to the place becoming quite an eyesore as no external painting had been undertaken for many years and it looked old, dirty and dilapidated. Dad didn’t know this when we were allocated the house and was quite ropeable when he saw it. Inside was fine though, as mum kept a clean and tidy home.  As teenagers it played havoc with the social lives of my sister and us boys because even though we lived on the “flashy” side of the railway line in Park St, whenever we brought prospective boyfriends/girlfriends home they took one look at the house and were never seen again.

Frank Berry, photo courtesy of Rod Berry.

© R Berry  2022