Recently I spent 10 minutes or so at Sydney’s busy suburban Strathfield Station while changing trains in the evening peak hour. As I waited I watched the synchronised dance across the station’s eight platforms as double-deck trains arrived, disgorged commuters, picked up more passengers and departed, all relatively quietly and with little fuss.
On my platform the movement was almost hypnotic, as four or five identical Waratah trains arrived in succession, stayed exactly the same length of time and then departed little more than two minutes apart. Whatever the state of the ageing Strathfield Station or the wider flaws of the Sydney transport system, the calm passage of these trains, all less than 10 years old and each carrying up to a thousand passengers, gave the impression of a reasonably modern, functional urban rail network.
My thoughts turned to John Job Crew Bradfield, the engineer whose name is inextricably linked with the development of Sydney’s transport infrastructure in the early 20th century. I don’t believe Bradfield had any special connection with Strathfield station which was opened in the 1870s, but he had a large hand in creating the electrified railway network which passes through it. He also oversaw the planning and construction of the two other key components of this network, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the underground railway in Sydney’s CBD.
Later when I was looking up some facts on Bradfield I realised that the 75th anniversary of his death on 23 September 1943 is approaching. In a modest commemoration I’ve decided to revisit not so much about the man himself, or indeed his achievements, but rather what he wrote about them. I’ll be concentrating in particular in this occasional series on Bradfield’s thesis for the degree of Doctor of Science in Engineering, which he was awarded by the University of Sydney in 1924.

Detail from the cover of Bradfield’s 1924 thesis (source: University of Sydney eScholarship Repository)
Every time I look at it (the thesis is available from the University repository) I’m struck by the extraordinary breadth of its scope – I suspect that no other thesis before or since has combined as a single subject the author’s own work in managing the planning and construction of a major bridge and an underground railway, as well as the electrification of a suburban rail network. Continue reading