St James Station – Hyde Park, Sydney – Bradfield's First Underground, the Ghost Platforms, the Wartime Tunnels and the Château Tanunda "Brandy of Distinction" Sign – 1926 to Today

Come up out of Hyde Park on Elizabeth Street, opposite David Jones, and look into the mouth of St James station. Glowing over the stairs, in pale blue and orange neon, are the words Château Tanunda – The Brandy of Distinction. Generations of Sydneysiders have caught the train under that sign without giving it a second look. It has been there since the late 1930s, and it advertises a South Australian brandy. Below it is a station that opened in 1926 as one of the first two underground stations in Australia, with platforms that never saw a train, tunnels that sheltered Sydney during the war, and a lake nobody's allowed to visit. Here's the story.

The Elizabeth Street entrance to St James station, with the Château Tanunda neon sign glowing inside, 2011. Image: Sardaka, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

A City Without a Railway

For most of the nineteenth century the trains stopped short of the city. The terminus sat out at Devonshire Street, near today's Central, and everyone walked, rode a tram or took a cab the rest of the way. The State Heritage Register tells how plans to bring the line into town were drawn up as early as 1857. Two royal commissions couldn't settle a route. A third, in 1908, recommended a loop railway with six underground stations, roughly where the stations are now.

Then came John Job Crew Bradfield. In 1915, as Chief Engineer of Metropolitan Railway Construction, he put up his plan for an electric underground city loop, a bridge across the harbour carrying lines to the North Shore, and branch lines running east and west. I've written about the man himself in Bradfield – The Harbour Bridge – The Trains – Water. In his plan St James was to be "a vital link in the network", built on two levels, the Heritage Register says.

Work began in 1916 on the link between Central and Macquarie Street. Funding ran out in 1918. From 1917 to 1922 Bradfield kept up a publicity campaign for his scheme, and in 1922 excavation for Museum and St James stations finally began.

Digging Up Hyde Park

The station sits right under the northern end of Hyde Park, the ground Governor Macquarie set aside in 1810. It was built by the cut-and-cover method, which meant digging an enormous trench through the park, building the station in concrete and roofing it over again. The State Library of NSW holds albums of Bradfield's own photographs of the work from 1922–23 and says plainly that "Hyde Park was excavated to construct Museum and St James stations". The Heritage Register says the entries and exits weren't finished until 1934, because the southern part of Hyde Park was only handed back to the City Council in 1932.

The station took its name from St James' Church, Greenway's old church across Queens Square. The Heritage Register describes four platforms and four tunnels, built for a far bigger network than the one that was eventually built.

An electric train on the line to St James. NSW State Archives dates this photograph to 27 April 1926. Image: NSW Archives, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Opening Day, 20 December 1926

On 20 December 1926 the line from Central to Museum and St James opened to passengers. The Heritage Register calls it "the first underground electric railway". The State Library notes it came about nine months after Sydney's first electric train service. Museum and St James opened the same day, so they share the title of Australia's first underground stations.

The NSW Government Architect George McRae designed the station. Both Wikipedia and the Sydney Architecture site say he died before it was finished. The street building on Elizabeth Street is in what the heritage people call Inter-War Stripped Classical style: smooth sandstone, a pair of copper-clad columns framing the doorway, a pressed-metal awning, and a stepped parapet carrying a cartouche with the date "1926". The Heritage Register says only two buildings of its type survive on the city railway, this one and the Museum entrance on Liverpool Street.

The St James entrance on Elizabeth Street in about 1954, with Hyde Park behind it. Image: State Archives and Records NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The same entrance in 2024. Image: Ymblanter, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Downstairs, Bradfield had a clever idea for helping passengers. Every station on the city line was tiled in the same cream body tiles, but each had its own coloured bands at the top and bottom, so you could tell where you were at a glance. Museum got red. St James got green, and the green is still there. The station's round signs were modelled on the London Underground roundel, and the Heritage Register calls it an "adaptation of the London tube-style station to the Australian situation".

One of the pedestrian subways, still lined in cream tiles with Bradfield's green banding, 2022. Image: Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The concourse is one of the best-kept interiors on the system. The Heritage Register lists five ticket windows edged in green tile, with timber counters and decorative iron grilles. The entries to the paid area are framed in iron with concertina lattice gates and pinecone finials. All of it dates from 1926.

The concourse, with its tiled columns, clock and 1926 ironwork, 2011. Image: Abesty, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The 1926 iron entry gates with their pinecone finials. Image: Abesty, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The stairs down to the platforms, 2024. Image: Ymblanter, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Thirty Years at the End of the Line

For thirty years St James was the end of the line. The western side of the loop through Town Hall to Wynyard opened on 28 February 1932, but the stretch between Wynyard and St James via Circular Quay dragged on through the Depression and the war. It opened on 22 January 1956, according to the State Library. Until then, trains from the East Hills and Illawarra lines ran into St James, emptied out, pulled into dead-end sidings in the tunnel stub north of the station, and came back out the other side. Wikipedia says the little St James signal box, worked with pistol-grip levers, was the smallest in New South Wales. It stayed in occasional use until 1990, and the sidings were formally closed on 27 July 1991.

A train at the platform, 2017. The green-banded tiles are Bradfield's colour code for St James. Image: Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The platform in 2022. Image: Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Platforms That Never Saw a Train

Bradfield built St James with four platforms. The two outer faces carried the City Circle trains. The two inner faces were for his planned eastern and western suburbs lines, and those were never built where he planned them. When the Eastern Suburbs line finally came in 1979, it went through Town Hall and Martin Place instead. No tracks were ever laid at the inner platforms. In the 1990s the gap between them was filled in to make the single wide island platform you walk along today. If you look at the columns down the middle, they once stood between the tracks that were never laid. The disused ends of the platforms are behind the walls at either end.

One of the walled-off disused platforms, 2016. Image: Beau Giles, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Inside the disused section, where the planned eastern and western suburbs lines were meant to run. Image: Beau Giles from Sydney, Australia, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The Tunnels

The unused tunnels run a long way. Wikipedia, drawing on Transport for NSW's Trippr site, says a double-track tunnel runs north about 250 metres under Macquarie Street to around the State Library, and two single-track tunnels run south to Whitlam Square, near the corner of Liverpool and College Streets.

They've had some odd tenants. In 1933–34, according to tunnel historians quoted by Wikipedia, a man named Raymond Mas grew mushrooms in the tunnel towards Circular Quay, about 4,500 kilograms a month.

One of the abandoned St James tunnels, 2018. Image: FotoSleuth, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

A ladder through a pilot shaft in the tunnels, 2018. Image: FotoSleuth, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Sheltering Sydney: The War Years

When Japan entered the war, the tunnels became part of Sydney's defences. The southern tunnels were turned into a public air-raid shelter, with chambers of about 30 metres each protected by blast walls and blast curtains. The Heritage Register calls these shelter areas "rare surviving elements of Sydney's World War II defences". Painted wartime notices can still be seen on the walls.

Faded wartime lettering on the walls of the air-raid shelter tunnels. Image: Beau Giles from Sydney, Australia, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Wartime and later graffiti on the tunnel walls. Image: Beau Giles from Sydney, Australia, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The northern tunnel, the never-used City Inner line, went to the air force. OzAtWar, which has worked through the RAAF unit records, says No. 1 Fighter Sector Headquarters handed operational control to the American 31st Pursuit Squadron "inside the St James Railway Tunnel" on 10 April 1942. The RAAF took it back on 3 August 1942. Here, under Macquarie Street, members of the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force plotted aircraft and shipping on a huge map table. The information came in from radar stations, weather posts and the Volunteer Air Observer Corps. OzAtWar quotes a WAAAF who worked there. She remembered six-hour shifts, because "any longer would have made us ill as the air conditioning was not very effective". She went down by "a set of wooden air raid steps leading down from the middle of the road opposite the library", at Shakespeare Place. She was on duty in the tunnel the night the Japanese midget submarines got into the harbour, and she said the people of Sydney thought it was "just another practice raid". On 31 August 1942 the unit was ordered out to Bankstown, and it moved by 7 September.

The wooden staircase lasted until 16 November 1968, when it burned. Wikipedia says smoke from the fire stopped trains for about twelve hours.

Big Ben, a Lake and the Movies

After the war the tunnels found a career in show business. The Heritage Register says ABC sound engineers used a bell in the southern tunnels in the 1960s to make fake Big Ben chimes for a television series, and that the bell is still down there. Other sources disagree. Journalist Steve Dow and others, quoted on Wikipedia, say the bell was put there by artist Nigel Helyer in 1992 for a work called An UnRequited Place, with the ABC broadcasting its midnight tolling for 21 days. Both stories are told, and I haven't been able to settle which is right.

Down the northern tunnel is the "fabled St James Lake", as the Heritage Register calls it, a low stretch of tunnel that has slowly filled with water. In the drought years of the mid-2000s there were serious proposals, backed by Clean Up Australia's Ian Kiernan, to use it to store recycled water for the Domain and the Botanic Garden. In January 2008 work began on a scheme to send rainwater from Parliament House into the tunnels. The tunnels and platforms have also been used for filming, including Police Rescue in the 1990s and The Matrix Revolutions (2003).

Château Tanunda – The Brandy of Distinction

Now back to that sign. The Heritage Register says the Château Tanunda neon sign at the Elizabeth Street entrance was put up in about 1938 by Tucker & Co., the brandy's New South Wales agents (later Tucker, Lingard & Co.). It calls it "a rare surviving example of a 1930s neon sign in Sydney". Sydney was full of neon in the thirties, but nearly all of it has gone. This one survived because it was in a heritage station and, perhaps, because nobody ever got round to taking it down. Tucker & Co. used the slogan for years. A 1962 Robinsons map of Sydney's historic buildings was published "in association with Tucker & Co. P/L – NSW agents for Chateau Tanunda – the brandy of distinction", according to a reference on the Heritage NSW database.

The entrance in 2023, with the station building beside Hyde Park. Image: Windmemories, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Elizabeth Street exit gates on the concourse, still framed by the original green ironwork and pinecone finials, 2024. Image: Ymblanter, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Château Tanunda itself is in the Barossa Valley, South Australia. The winery's own history says it was established in 1890, when phylloxera was destroying Europe's vineyards. The idea was a grand château that could rival the French. It bought grapes from 560 local growers, "paid a pound per gallon", and the winery says it became "the largest winery in the Southern Hemisphere at the time". The wine-history site robertonfray.com says the Seppelt family took over in 1916, and brandy became the main business. A still house at the front of the estate made brandy "used throughout the Commonwealth for medicinal purposes", known as "the brandy of distinction". People who grew up in the 1950s and 60s may remember the radio jingle "No wonder, no wonder, it's Château Tanunda", quoted by a reader on the Footy Almanac site.

The bluestone Château Tanunda in the Barossa Valley, 2016. Image: Mitchemck, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The view from the Château Tanunda wine cellars, about 1925, by the South Australian State Government Photographer. Image: State Government Photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

Vineyards at Château Tanunda, 2006. Image: Fairv8, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The winery's fortunes faded under corporate ownership. It says that by the 1990s the property, then owned by Southcorp, was "a shell of its former glory". John Geber and his family bought it in 1998 and restored it. Château Tanunda opened a Sydney cellar door in 2021, so the brandy that's been advertised under Hyde Park since the 1930s has a home in the city again.

Heritage and Recent Years

In 1997 the Institution of Engineers Australia gave St James a Historic Engineering Marker for the engineering behind it. The station was listed on the State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999, as the "St. James Railway Station group". The Register calls it one of "the most ornate station interiors in the NSW railway system". The old toilet block in the Elizabeth Street building became a café in the 1990s. Lifts arrived in 2010, first between platform and concourse and later from the concourse to the street. In 2018 Transport for NSW called for expressions of interest in turning the tunnels into Sydney's next underground attraction.

Next Time You're There

Take a moment at the top of the stairs. The green tiles are Bradfield's, the iron gates are from 1926, and the neon above you was switched on before the war. Behind the walls at either end of the platform are tracks that were never laid, an air-raid shelter, an RAAF bunker and an underground lake.

References

• Heritage NSW, State Heritage Register, "St. James Railway Station group" (SHR 01248) and Sydney Trains s170 entry "St James Railway Station".
• Heritage NSW, "Museum Railway Station".
• State Library of NSW, "Construction of Sydney City Railway, 1922–1923 / photographed by J. Bradfield" and "Underground albums".
• Dictionary of Sydney, "St James railway station".
• OzAtWar, "No. 1 Fighter Sector Headquarters RAAF, later known as No. 101 Fighter Control Unit RAAF".
• Wikipedia, "St James railway station, Sydney" (for the signal box, sidings, mushroom farm, tunnel lengths, the bell, the lake and lifts).
• Château Tanunda, "Our Story"; robertonfray.com, "Old Vines, New World" (July 2026); The Plus Ones (2023) on the Sydney cellar door.
• Mickey Randall, "The Chateau Tanunda neon sign in St. James Station", The Footy Almanac, January 2025.