Hidden under Central Station lies a clock collector’s paradise

The six-metre by eight-metre room – in which the dim light makes it clear this is more of a storeroom than a museum – is filled with hundreds of mechanical clocks, stacked upon each other with layers of bubble wrap in between, or lying horizontally in shelves that line the other walls.

Other artefacts taking up space include dyes used to print train tickets and protective carry bags used for transporting mechanical wall clocks.

But it’s overwhelmingly a place for clocks – and at up to $10,000 apiece, they’re overwhelmingly valuable, making them a target for collectors and counterfeiters alike – in a market in love with railway heritage memorabilia.

“Those ones downstairs are exceptionally expensive,” Andrew Markerink, a consultant horologist to Transport for NSW, who knows the room well, tells AFR Weekend.

“They are very, very, very sought after. They’re collectible and they were commonly stolen. So they need to maintain a fairly high security. If you left them out in a public spot, the likelihood is they’d either be vandalised or stolen.”

Many have, in fact, already vanished. While the room under Central holds 200 such timepieces – a further 200 are still in use across the network – they’re the vestigial remnants of some 2800 mechanical clocks and 6500 pocket watches that were once relied upon to keep time throughout NSW, but which has shrunk due to theft, breakage – and retirement presents.

Value comes down to the condition of the clocks made by the Connecticut-based Seth Thomas Clock Company, and the device’s branding, Markerink says.

“If there was not ‘New South Wales Government Railways’ written on the dial, they’d probably be about $1000 to $1500. They become probably seven or eight times more valuable by having a name on the dial with New South Wales Government Railways,” he says.

And they’re relatively easy to forge, Markerink says.

“That’s commonly seen. We saw five at auction only nine months ago, all being sold as specialty railway, New South Government Railways clocks and every one of them was a fake.”

He declines to name the auction house, but says they quickly pulled the planned sale.

“They catalogued them, and then asked for advice. We gave them the advice, and they withdrew them from auction.”

A NSW Police spokesperson said the force was not aware of scams involving counterfeit railway clocks and that passing them off was a matter for NSW Fair Trading. A Fair Trading spokesperson said the agency did not have any record of complaints about counterfeit clocks, but encouraged people to report any fake collectibles through the Fair Trading website.

Back – or forward – in time

In an age when most people rely on their phones to tell the time, the collection is a snapshot of an earlier technology that once ruled people’s lives.

The NSW railways network came to life in 1855, with the first passenger line from Sydney to “Parramatta Junction” – a site west of the present-day Granville Railway Station. The introduction of clocks after that standardised time for people in the colony.

By 1921, Central’s master clock – a precision clock located in the Prince Alfred sidings – was sending a regular electrical impulse twice a minute down the railway lines on a wire, moving hands on the connected “slave” clocks (including the Central clock tower’s clock, completed that year) in each station.

“The most important thing you have to remember about railways and railway lines is they were the very first system used to be able to send standardised time over a large area,” Markerink says.

“That standardisation of time had to be kept by something along those lines, and the clocks in the clock room at Central are the thing that maintained that exact time for everybody that used rail.”

Railway time became the reference time for an entire community.

The railways’ stock of clocks didn’t just comprise Seth Thomas mechanical clocks, which were reliable and popular because they only needed winding once a month. It also included pocket watches – replaced by wristwatches in the 1970s – electrical impulse clocks, round-faced clocks and signal box clocks.

But time doesn’t stand still – not even for railways. The platforms at Central’s Sydney Metro Station, which opened with fanfare last year, don’t have clocks on them. After all, the system that promises trains every four minutes at peak times allows commuters to just turn up and ride.

“You don’t need a timetable to go down to the Metro,” says architect John Prentice, whose firm Woods Bagot designed Central’s Metro station along with John McAslan + Partners and GHD.

“The reliability and convenience of it is one of the major selling points of metro as a transport mode in cities.”

So if your phone battery is flat and you don’t have a watch, you’ll still be able to check the time while on a Metro platform because passenger information displays show the time.

But the designers of the new station still seized on the clock heritage in their plans. They took a dilapidated heritage clock hanging on a canopy that had to be removed for construction of the new station, had it refurbished and mounted it on the glass-reinforced concrete “clock wall” that guides passengers moving between the old and new stations.

“Time was of interest for us,” Prentice says. “It was a homage to the heritage, a nod to the clock tower and clock room.”

The clock has recently been covered. Transport for NSW says it stopped working and will be repaired once parts are sourced. Meanwhile, it has been covered up so as not to confuse commuters.

What to do with them?

The State Rail Authority stopped the selling of clocks and presentation of time pieces to retiring staff in the 1980s. The current underground collection at Central brought the remaining collection together from storage in Strathfield in 2015.

But the legacy collection of clocks creates a dilemma for the state railway operator, which has a core business of running trains. They shouldn’t be downstairs in a room with restricted access, Prentice says.

“It’s a bit of a shame – you have all those amazing clocks down there and to what benefit?” he says.

The railway operator says it’s aware of the issue, but says it has higher priorities than its stock of clocks. Also, the collection isn’t only in the underground room – another 200 are elsewhere within the state, some undergoing repairs, others still in use at stations or other locations across the network, still being wound by hand where necessary – it says.

“Transport for NSW is continuing to explore opportunities for how this collection’s heritage significance can be best communicated and shared with the public,” a spokesperson says.

“It is a huge undertaking in terms of resources and funding that will take time to realise given the scale of Transport for NSW’s overall heritage portfolio, the need to continue operating a critical transportation system for the people of NSW, and ongoing works to modernise the network.”

But Markerink expresses frustration, saying talk about the collection has shunted back and forth and never reached a clear destination.

“There’s been discussions had over years and years and years,” he says. “It’s the nature of any organisation that people change, and then the direction of which something was going changes,” he says.