Kogarah railway station is located on the CityRail Illawarra line. It serves the southern Sydney suburb of Kogarah, a residential and commercial area including the head-office complex of the St George Bank and the administrative centre for the local government area of the Municipality of Kogarah. The station concourse links directly to a small shopping mall called Kogarah Town Centre, which has been built directly over the railway platforms and beside them on Railway Parade.
The Australian critic and television presenter Clive James has sarcastically described it as
a symphony in reinforced concrete outstripping even a Todt Organization WWII flak emplacement for brutalist elegance. In my youth it was an unusually pretty railway station on the Illawarra line, but later the combined geniuses of Kogarah Council had the inspired idea of reinforcing it against air attack by bunker-busting bombs and decking out the result with a dozen different outlets for fast food. The result was the masterpiece you can see today.
The station opened with the opening of the railway line in October 1884.
On 13 April 2010, a rail maintenance worker died while working on a closed section of track by a passing train near Kogarah. It is unclear why the train was using a closed rail line at 1am. Five other workers managed to clear the track when they spotted the train.
Read more about Kogarah Railway Station: Platforms and Services, Accessibility, Transport Links, Gallery, Neighbouring Stations
Famous quotes containing the words railway and/or station:
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)