Train of Thought: Eveleigh

This next suburb's a bit of an odd one. It's small, is mainly made up of train tracks, and yet also has a few notable points of interest.

Eveleigh

Eveleigh straddles the boundaries of the Inner West and the Inner City, capturing all of many train tracks between Redfern and Macdonaldtown. Macdonaldtown's the weirder of the two stations, so that's where my suburb-companion and I got out, after a short five minute train ride from Central.

Macdonaldtown Station's a bit of a funny one. When you get off the train, it doesn't look like you're on the CBD's outskirts. Instead, you're basically in a train yard.

We exited through what can only be described as an underground war bunker in order to get to the street.

"But what are you doing?" you may ask. "You can't put pictures up of Macdonaldtown on a post about Eveleigh!" Well as it turns out, there is no Sydney suburb called Macdonaldtown at all, it's kind of just a... place sandwiched between the suburbs of Newtown, Eveleigh and Erskineville. Rest assured though, the station is firmly in Eveleigh.

Here's the bit where we get controversial though. Once you leave the station, you're in Newtown. To get to my Eveleigh destination, I had to walk on a Newtownian path. I apologise for any distress this may cause.

Regardless, this is quite a nice path, with bushes growing on the fence to the train line,

a mural to an interesting piece of modern history relating to US Civil Rights (if you're not familiar with the events of this mural, look it up, it's a great story),

and even what appears to be a bit of a community garden.

But all that stuff's Newtown, so don't look at these pictures please.

Eventually, I re-entered the suburb we're actually featuring here.

This pathway leads down, past some new apartments,

and some old rail tracks embedded in the road,

to reach this place.

This is Carriageworks, and is the reason I had headed to Eveleigh today in the first place. A former rail yard, this is now a space for the arts.

I was actually here today to attend the Sydney Tea Festival.

The tea festival was basically a giant warehouse full of tea makers selling their teas. Now that doesn't sound exciting, but every single stall had free samples. You even got a tasting cup as you came in. My suburb-companion and I had paid $16.95 each for our "earlybird" tickets, so we had to drink a buttload of free samples to get our money's worth. All in all, a fun detour.

After drinking our weight in tea samples,

we said goodbye to Carriageworks to check out the rest of Eveleigh.

This, again, is where things get dicey. Just like the way in to Carriageworks, the way out isn't really in Eveleigh either. Hence, we walked through a short portion of neighbouring Darlington like dirty animals.

After not to long, this leads into Redfern train station. Want to know something wild? It turns out that the platforms of Redfern Station are actually in the suburb of Eveleigh. That gives Eveleigh the honour of being the second suburb I've visited so far with two train stations in it, after Campbelltown. Not a bad feat considering how big Campbelltown is in comparison.

Anyway, we walked all the way around Redfern station to cross to the other side of the tracks and explore the side of Eveleigh that isn't Carriageworks.

It starts off with this little bit of green space which is in Eveleigh, but then that apartment building in the background is in Redfern. This is getting to be a pain.

Averting our gaze as we shuffled past the Redfern apartment block, we re-entered Eveleigh again. I think we're in the clear now guys.

This bit of the suburb is pretty cool. It's, once again, made up of a bunch of converted old rail and industrial buildings which now have important sounding names like "International Business Centre" and "National Innovation Centre".

This space soon merges into the ultra-modern Australian Technology Park, a still-work-in-progress business park made up of shiny new office buildings.

Walking through a business park on a weekend is always a little bit surreal due to the lack of life outside of business hours. This effect in "South Eveleigh" is exasperated as this place hasn't quite finished being built.

Further again, past the business park, is a small residential area made up of a few apartment blocks.

Some newer apartment complexes can feel really soulless but I actually really like this area, with plenty of trees and greenspace in amongst it all.

Although the lack of people out and about is a little odd considering the suburb's inner-city location.

Residential Eveleigh soon ended, just as business Eveleigh did before it, and we found ourselves skirting the border of the suburb once more.

At the end of the road, we left Eveleigh properly and headed to the next suburb for lunch.

Eveleigh: The little railyard that could.