The Dark Story of Islington Workshops: How Australia's Biggest Railways Giant Was Abandoned

The Dark Story of Islington Workshops: How Australia's Biggest Railways Giant Was Abandoned Six thousand three hundred workers at Kilburn by nineteen forty-two. Islington wasn't a rail workshop. It was South Australia's industrial heart, where Bren carriers rolled off the line for the Army. Australia's biggest railway giant. But on the twenty-first of May, nineteen seventy-five, Gough Whitlam and Don Dunstan signed the Transfer Agreement. South Australian Railways became a Commonwealth asset. Retired Commissioner Ron Fitch predicted the merger would consign the system to eventual oblivion. Thirty-eight years later, the earthmovers arrived. Today, Regency and Churchill Roads is a Coles, a Kmart, Australia's first Costco. At Port Adelaide, Lady Norrie 900 stands preserved static. This is the story of a political signature killing South Australia's greatest complex. What that erasure says about state institutions. This is not the story of an Adelaide workshop. It's the story of thirty-eight years to erase a state. #IslingtonWorkshops #IslingtonRailwayWorkshops #AbandonedFactories #LostFactories #IndustrialDecline #AustralianManufacturing