St Kilda - Windsor railway line, Melbourne

St Kilda - Windsor
Overview
Type	Melbourne suburban service
Status	Parkland, private ownership
Connecting lines	St Kilda and Sandringham lines
Stations	None
Operation
Opened	1859
Closed	24 November 1860
Number of tracks	Single track

The St Kilda-Windsor railway line was a short-lived section of railway that linked the isolated Windsor to Brighton (Bay Street) section of the Melbourne railway network to the city. The branch line fell into disuse when an alternative route was built between Windsor and Richmond stations.

Windsor Station was originally called "Chapel Street Station", and was the terminus for northbound trains from the Brighton Beach line. It was run by the St Kilda and Brighton Railway Company, who built the loop branch line connecting the Brighton line to the now defunct St Kilda line to connect the isolated line to the city. Trains from the city travelled south to St Kilda terminus, and then "backed out" onto the line to Windsor. The loop line was constructed on wooden trestles across the swamp now known as the Albert Park Lake, and had a raised embankment with a bridge over St Kilda Road.

A possible reason for the construction of the loop line connecting through to St Kilda was the difficulty experienced by contractors in constructing a rail crossing over the Yarra River at Cremorne, known in the early 19th century as "Forrest Hill". Although today the area is noted for the imposing Melbourne High School to the east of the railway embankment and exclusive houses of South Yarra to the west, in the mid-19th century, the railway bisected a vast swamp. Cooper (1924; p. 181) reports that when the rail embankment was first being constructed it subsided, burying ballast trucks in the swamp. The cost of recovering the trucks was deemed to be uneconomic, so a second embankment was constructed over them.

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