DEEPWATER RAILWAY STATION
CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT PLAN
SECTION 2• DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE • PAGE 7

built around an embankment slip that failed to respond to remedial action.20 In 1921 a goods train collided with another earth-slide at Ben Lomond, this time at the `big cutting' north of the present village, requiring the combined labour of some 200 hands to remove the engine from the mire .21 Further recovery work was needed a few days later when yet another freight train ran off the temporary loop that had been built around the slip.22

Railway Builders

Large numbers of men, women and children laboured directly and indirectly on the construction of the line. A group of 200 men working on a single cutting or embankment would have been a common enough sight in the area. It is not commonly realised that the bigger New England camps temporarily dwarfed the populations of some established towns in the region such as Uralla. At their peak, Ben Lomond's two major camps possibly even approached the population of nearby Glen Innes (1327 in 1881) for a brief period in 1882-3. 23
Death stalked railway construction workers in the Nineteenth Century. For example, there were at least seven fatal accidents at Ben Lomond alone.24 Some of these accidents were not directly related to work, but resulted from a combination of (probable) inebriation and the dangerous terrain of the railway works.25
However, alcohol played no part in some of the more tragic construction fatalities at Ben Lomond. In July 1883 a nine-year-old boy was buried under a slip of about five tonnes of earth, and could not be rescued by desperate fellow workers. A
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Sources
20 New South Wales Railway Commissioner's Annual Report (hereafter AR), 1886, p. 12; GIE, 18 March 1890, p. 2.
21 Armidale Chronicle, 1 June 1921, p. 4; AE, 3 June 1921, p. 2. Zz AE, 7 June 1921, pp. 4, 7.
23 J. Byron (Compiler), Census of 1881 (Sydney, 1884), table 5.
24 D. Rowe, `The Robust Navvy: the Railway construction worker in Northern New South Wales, 1854-1894', Labor History, 39 (1980), pp. 38, 43.
25 See AE, 6 July 1883, p. 4; 5 October 1883, p. 2; 19 October 1883, p. 2; 7 December 1883, p. 6, 11 December 1883, p. 2.