Hornsby railway station

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Hornsby railway station is a suburban railway station located at the junction of the Main North and North Shore lines, serving the Sydney suburb of Hornsby. It is served by Sydney Trains T1 North Shore Line and T9 Northern Line services and intercity Central Coast & Newcastle Line services, as well as NSW TrainLink regional services.

History

The station opened on 17 September 1886 as Hornsby, but was renamed Hornsby Junction on 1 November 1894. This was due to the construction of Normanhurst station to the south, which was initially named Hornsby as it was located in what was the more densely populated area of Hornsby at the time. Naming the station Hornsby Junction was an attempt to avoid confusion, but it was realised that having two Hornsby stations was still very confusing. On 1 May 1900, the suburb and station to the south was renamed Normanhurst, and Hornsby Junction reverted to Hornsby.<ref>Hornsby Station Template:Webarchive NSWrail.net</ref><ref>Hornsby Railway Station Group & Barracks Template:Webarchive NSW Environment & Heritage</ref>

On 1 January 1890, Hornsby became a junction station with the opening of the North Shore line to St Leonards. In 1894, a third platform was built along with a locomotive depot to the east of the station.<ref>"Byways of Steam Cowan – Hornsby" Roundhouse January 1985 pages 4-24</ref> Hornsby was the northern extremity of the electrified network from 1930 until it was extended to Gosford in 1960. The wires did continue north of the station as far as the Hornsby Maintenance Depot.

The station was extensively upgraded in 1986, including tiling of the platform, the addition of shelters and the modification of the southern concourse. The southern concourse was again extensively modified sometime between April 1994 and October 1995 to include brick lift shafts and accessibility to each platform.Template:Cn

As part of the CityRail Clearways Project, a fifth platform was constructed for use by through northbound trains. To allow for the new line, the Hornsby Signal Box was shifted 120 metres in 2007.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The new platform opened on 16 March 2009, with the existing Platform 4 becoming a turnback platform for Northern line trains. The additional platform allows extra trains to run on the Northern line via the Epping to Chatswood line and improves reliability.<ref>Hornsby Platform 5 & Stabling Project Profile Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation</ref> As Hornsby is both an originating and terminating point for some services, on 10 July 2003 the communications system in a Millennium Train failed because the train's software could not compute that the origin and destination of the service had the same name.<ref>Millennium Train Incident Reports CityRail 24 October 2007</ref>