DEEPWATER RAILWAY STATION
CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT PLAN
SECTION 2 DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE PAGE 4

2.0 DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
2.1 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW - RAILWAY IN NEW ENGLAND
Railway expansion in the Victorian age was claimed by some to be the greatest industrial achievement in history.8 Railways revolutionised entire economies, and had a profound effect on the political, social and cultural life in Australia. When the railway reached the New England at Armidale in February 1883, one long forgotten colonial politician (Henry Copeland) exclaimed that the Great Northern railway `annihilated space and time'.9 The modem world had arrived in New England._
 Brisbane was the destination of a.' the Great Northern Railway.`The connection of Queensland  with New South Wales',1885 TO 1895 predicted the Glen Innes" Examiner in 1881, `will not only open up a tremendous extent ... of mineral and pastoral country in New England, but will be one of the principal incentives to the federation of the colonies'." Tenterfield, just below the border, would indeed play an important role in Federation. The coming of the railway might be construed as the culmination of the `frontier'
 phase of New England history.
.......................
Map of NSW showing the railway line built between 1885 and 1895. Source: The Railways of NSW 1855-1955.

......................
The Great Northern line was certainly the most tangible link with the politically and economically dominant metropolis, even if the New England tablelands were railway lines built not directly linked with Sydney until 1889, when the Hawkesbury River finally between 1885 and was bridged at Brooklyn. Yet of the three trunk routes that spread west, south and 1895. Source: The north through New South Wales, the Great Northern Railway was perhaps the least  significant in economic and political terms. For a start, it had originated in regional Newcastle, not central Sydney. Nor was it perceived as an aggressive assertion of colonial political might, as were the southern trunk and branch lines, which connected Sydney with rich agricultural regions that were hitherto geographically and economically attuned to Melbourne.
Whilst New England had become a reasonably prosperous pastoral and mining centre by 1880, it was still comparatively isolated. New England's rail aspirations were never satisfied - the failure to complete a direct coastal link with a northern deep-sea port, for example, was a political sore that festered for years and gave much impetus to the separatist New State Movement in the Twentieth Century. Nevertheless the railway did provide a means of getting New England produce to distant markets in a reliable and comparatively efficient manner.
..........................
Sources
8/ E. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 114-15.
9/ Sydney Morning Herald, 2 February 1883, p. 8.
10/ Glen Innes Examiner (hereafter GIE), 25 October 1881, p. 2.
To see more, page 2 Deepwater Documentary evidence.