Elsie Lange
The curious case of the Sunbury Station clock sounds like the title of a quaint crime novel, complete with a detective wearing a trench coat and a deerstalker cap, a magnifying glass at the ready.
It’s not so mysterious, really, but residents have often wondered why it runs slow, or sometimes, seemingly not at all, lulling them into a false sense of security before the train departs the platform.
It stands on the Sunbury Central side of the tracks, next to the stairs of the overpass. It was installed in 2000, as part of the development of the shopping precinct formerly owned by Glenn Ingram.
“The architect was a bit of a rail buff [at the time] and he said we’ve got to have a clock tower … there were some heritage considerations and the result was pretty good,” Mr Ingram said.
“We built the clock tower and we fairly quickly came to rue having done it because the minute the clock was a few moments out, we would be the recipient of people who were quite grumpy because … they would say, ‘We’ve missed our train’”.
Resident David Tennant alerted the Star Weekly to the hands moving at a snails’ pace around the dial.
“Time has definitely stopped there, with the clock,” Mr Tennant said.
“It’s at the station, I can’t recall it ever working. It can’t be that hard, [with] what you can do now.”
But actually, it is rather difficult, with so few experts in the field anymore.
Current owner of the Sunbury Central site, Tony Boothroyd, said because it was very old it did require attention, but there weren’t many clock-fixing contractors in the state available, and the parts were hard to come by.
After Star Weekly raised the issue, Mark Hogarth, a guard at Sunbury Central since the place opened, contacted Young’s Clock Fixers in Bendigo to come have a look and make repairs.
“It took me ages to locate the fella, because it’s specialised … Last time it took me six months to find [him],” Mr Hogarth said.
The parts have now been taken away for servicing and the system will be upgraded, but for now, the hands will point to the sky, at 12 o’clock, which is the custom for when an analogue clock is being repaired, Mr Hogarth said.
