Circa 1904 - "BOAT DOCKED NEAR BRIDGE OVER GEORGES RIVER AT COMO, NEW SOUTH WALES", Sydney, Australia (restored colourized version)

IMAGE INFO

- The view is looking north-east across the completely re-built second version of "J. H. Wills" boat-hire shed & the paddle steamer P.S. "TELEPHONE" docked at the floating pontoon/jetty facility.

- John "Jack" H. Wills (with partner Mr Press) was a well-known manager/operator of part of the local Como cruise & pleasure boat hiring business, along with the other primary boat-shed owners, Mr Wheatley & Mr James F. Murphy (also manager of the Holt-Sutherland Estate Land Company), who each owned & operated boat-sheds just to the east of the southern abutment of the rail bridge.

- The original boat-shed Mr Press & Jack Wills had planned for the site (application for lease in Oct 1893) had been granted on 17 Oct 1894 by the NSW Legislative Assembly, with construction completed sometime in 1895. However, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a devastating fire destroyed the original boating facility shortly after, on 6 December 1895.

- Further in the background can be seen the original single line, steel lattice railway bridge crossing the Georges River at Como.

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SOURCE INFO

- I created this restored image version from a download of part of a screen capture of a digitized image of a very rare glass plate negative which is held in the National Library of Australia collection.

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CREDITS

- Credits go to -

(a) the creator of the original excellent negative used for this particular restoration - Charles Harper Bennett (1840-1927).

(b) the National Library of Australia

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ORIGINAL IMAGE COPYRIGHT STATUS

- Per the NLA advice -

nla.gov.au/nla.obj-141555402

"Out of Copyright

Reason for copyright status: Created/Published Date is Before 1955

Copyright status was determined using the following information:

Material type: Photograph

Published status: Unpublished

Government copyright ownership: No Government Copyright Ownership".

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HISTORIC INFO

- Bridge info from Wikipedia - "The original Como Railway Bridge opened on 26 December 1885 as part of the extension of the Illawarra railway line from Hurstville to Sutherland. It was a single track lattice truss bridge designed by John Whitton, the Chief Engineer of the New South Wales Government Railways. The double tracks converged to a single gauntlet track on the bridge, which enabled trains to cross in either direction without points. When the rest of the line was duplicated, it became a major bottleneck.

- Between 1935 and 1942, the Metropolitan Water Sewerage & Drainage Board built two 60 centimetre diameter pipelines to pump water from the recently completed Woronora Dam to the reservoir at Penshurst. The pipeline was supported on new steel outriggers cantilevered from the main girders.

- Second bridge -

To relieve the bottleneck, a new double track reinforced concrete bridge immediately to the west opened on 27 November 1972. The original bridge reopened as a cycleway (& pedestrian path) on 15 December 1985".

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RE-PROCESS INFO

- Latest version re-coloured using MyHeritage app.

- Image enhanced using Topaz Gigapixel AI, Skylum Luminar Neo AI & Adobe Photoshop CS2.

Done