Anyone who has used Wynyard Station since 1959 will be quite familiar with the fact that the entire layout of the station is delightfully daft. Wynyard with its platforms 3 & 4 upstairs and 5 & 6 downstairs is an enigma. Platforms 1 & 2 used to exist and in fact the tunnels are still there, although partly fill up with car park but the fact that 5 & 6 are underneath 1 & 2 which are no longer there, means that the four platforms are not only offset from each other but they are on different levels with the remnants of the booking hall between them.
The usual imagined story for Wynyard Station's daftness is that there was supposed to be not one but two railway lines heading over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and that a wee little thing called The Depression starved the NSW Treasury of monies for a while, and a second wee little thing called World War II also got in the way. By the time that Sydney completed the City Circle, plans were already afoot to tear at the fabric of the transport system by myopic tory knaves, of the sort who have continued to stall this fine city to this very today.
The two lines which would have gone over the Sydney Harbour Bridge would have been the North Shore Line which does exist and the Northern Beaches line which does not. The credit and vision of this is attributed to Dr John C Bradfield, after whom Bradfield Highway, that is the six lane roadway which passes over the Sydney Harbour Bridge is named. In many respects he is arguably the father of Sydney's railway system.
However, even Dr Bradfield's vision for the future transport of the City of Sydney did not exist in a vacuum. Indeed there were in fact previous plan's which came before him and one of those was by some almost forgotten and certainly unheralded boffin called Mr Hay. I have found precious little about Mr Hay and I have no idea who important he was within the NSW Department of Works, but evidently Hay's Scheme was reasonably well know and goes even further to explain why Wynyard has four platforms, why it originally had six platforms, and why the architecture of the station suggests that it should really have eight platforms.
Variations of the Sydney Underground system always seem to include stations at Town Hall and Wynyard Square, more or less in their current positions, as far back as 1890. They also always seem to include stations at Circular Quay with a raised viaduct, and a return loop with all kinds of alignments; similar to the current set up at St James Square and Goulburn St/Museum.
This 1912 scheme includes stations at Liverpool St and Darlinghurst; which would probably then continue to somewhere in the region of Moore Park and on to the Eastern Suburbs. In fact the current Eastern Suburbs Railway (ESR), could have also started from the two centre platforms at St James and through the stub tunnels which currently make a right hand turn into flooded bedrock.
But what this 1912 scheme makes clear is that in addition to the ESR, there should also be a Western Suburbs Railway (WSR); which would have had stations at places like Rozelle, Drummoyne, Gladesville and maybe as far afield as Ryde, Rydalmere and Parramatta. The WSR in the 1912 Hays Scheme, imagines a station underneath the GPO in a similar manner to how Martin Place exists today; before turning left and underneath the two northen lines; to possibly come out at pipehead and crossing Darling Harbour with some kind of Bridge or Tunnel.
The idea of tunnelling underwater was already a thing in London. By 1890 the Underground had already tunnelled under the Thames; so a project like tunnelling under Darling Harbour was already technically possible. A little thing called the First World War got in the way of Mr Hay's Scheme and so all of these pretty little drawings amounted to a whole lot of nothing but there are instructive as to what was to come.
This is where my theory comes in and why I think that Wynyard looks this way that it does.
1 & 2 and 3 & 4 are obviously in the style of the New York Subway; which was the symbol of looking to the future. That might sound absolutely bonkers given the eventual state of the New York Subway and that by all accounts it constantly smells like urine but this was more than a century ago and Wynyard Station is 92 years old.
What I think the plan by the time that Wynyard Station was approved was, was for 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 to be up top and 5 & 6 and 7 & 8 to be below. My suspicion is that St James would have been where the ESR would have turned off and head east via the central platforms but that Wynyard would have been a little buit more normal, with 5 & 6 being the City Circle platforms and 7 & 8 turning off and heading west for the WSR. As I imagine a lower level at a Wynyard Station which never was, it would have looked like a 1:1 copy of St James station in the dress colours of Blue and Grey which it originally wore as opposed to the Green and Cream which St James station wears.
Had Wynyard Station been completed as per what I think that the 1912 Hays Scheme and the imagined plans for what Bradfield was thinking of, then I think that it might look bit like this picture; but possibly with extra supports in the centre, or even a continuous wall. As it stands, the lower levels of Wynyard Station are only the right hand half of this picture. The left half which could have been built at the same time that the station box was built and opened in 1932, never existed. Very clearly though, it should. Otherwise, the fact that you do only have two lower level platforms with weird offset descending stairs, is dafter than a nine dollar note.
My perpetual melancholy and now infinite sadness is that Wynyard Station by reason of being hemmed in by the Sydney Metro and what will be the Western Sydney Metro (to be labelled as M1 and M2), will never attain its full complement of 8 platforms. The Western Sydney Metro basically does the job that the 1912 WSR would have done, and the further burrowing of tunnels through the city is such that it would be impossible to thread a needle for full size Pullman railway car tunnels in that part of the bedrock. There is a feeble hope that platforms 1 & 2 will be restored to former working glory if the idea of a Northern Beaches Railway (like an L) ever takes off by 7 & 8 will only even remain the stuff of past future imaginations.
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