Macksville: I'll drink to that
A couple of blokes opened a pub back in 1885 and inadvertently established a village called Macksville. Angus Mackay and Hugh McNally's Star Hotel quickly had a town spring up around it that took on the name Macks Village. In keeping true to our Aussie habit of giving everything a nickname, (and perhaps even shortening our nicknames even further), the town's name was changed to Macksville in 1889, well before the arrival of the first train in town. By 1919, the railway line had arrived in Macksville from Kempsey to the south, and almost 100 years later trains still call at this town of 2,658 on the North Coast Line. As for the pub? The Star Hotel is still there, restored and ready to keep serving up views of the Nambucca River for another hundred years. Trains and a pub, I'll drink to that!
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| Macksville Railway Station on the North Coast Line, looking south 2007. |
Macksville's railway station is a type 12 Ac4 station building that was once a common funcionalist design used during the 1st World War. More than 140 of these pre-fabricated concrete station buildings were built across New South Wales, and Macksville Railway Station is one of only a few of these buildings still remaining today.
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| Macksville Railway Station looking to the north. Photo taken 2007. |
Today, Macksville has 3 return XPT's to Sydney stop at its 1919 station building. There is still a small yard and an attached goods shed standing opposite the platform, and a passing parade of interstate container trains between Sydney and Brisbane that rumble throughout the night. Macksville Station looks as though it would make a fine candidate for a model railway. I covered the North Coast Line from Brisbane to Sydney and back in my book Train Tripping Eastern Australia, but passed through Macksville in both directions in the wee hours of the morning. So the photos you see were taken by myself back in 2007, during one of my whistle stop photo shoots while driving to Port Macquarie for a family holiday.
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