We went south to the village of Michelago today. It's 50km or so south of Canberra, just off the Monaro Highway. Once it was a busy town, but now it's quite small and without many of the services it used to have. Maybe that will change though, as it's cheaper to buy property there than Canberra, and it's within commuting distance to both Canberra and Queanbeyan.
You'd be waiting a while for the train at this station though. Opened in 1887, this branch line was eventually extended to Cooma in 1889 and Bombala in 1921, but in 1887, if you wanted to go to Cooma, you got off the train at the terminus here and boarded a stage coach for the rest of the journey. The branch line was closed in 1989, but opened as a limited heritage railway from 1993 until 1997, when the line was washed out near Royalla. However, there is a campaign to repair and reopen the line - if you're interested, there's a petition and more information here.
2 comments:
Beautiful ambience in these old stations! Hope this one comes alive again with use!
The Michelago station has been beautifully kept up to date. However it is of HUGE dissapointment that the Canberra Railway group thats been in charge of the line from Queanbeyan to Michelago has NOT run historical services like they intended. Over the way on the same line on the Chakola to Cooma section, another group has been sucessfully operating both track and rolling stock for a decade now. When is the Canberra branch going into action ?
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