The Roundhouse Museum is celebrating 30 years on Easter Saturday and Sunday and what better way than to drop the entry fees for Junee locals to come and celebrate with them?
Entry will be entirely free for all Junee residents across those two days.
Gale Commens told the Junee Independent that it will only be as long as they have proof of where they live. She said they were planning something bigger, but due to the timing of it being around Easter, they decided on the free entry.
“Those sorts of things have to be booked out like two years ahead. We wanted to celebrate because it’s a fairly high milestone and we thought, well, let’s just open it up to the locals and we’re hoping people who have never been there before who don’t realise just what we have come through, we just might pick up a few more volunteers as well,” she said.
“The railway closed there in 1993. I called a public meeting at the end of May 1994. Prior to that I had spoken with Bruce Baird and asked if we could have it as a museum. Bruce Baird was then the Minister of Transport for New South Wales. I think he thought I was dreaming. I had a submission with the then General Manager of the Shire on his desk the following morning and so that’s how we started.
“So I called a public meeting in November ’94 and we started getting rid of graffiti and repairing broken windows that unfortunately was happening with the young people around not all of them, but the not so good young people around town were just coming in wrecking the place. We were cleaning it up. I also went to Sydney twice to look at rolling stock that was up for auction and got two 44 class engines and a full silver train set.
“Originally we thought we’d run trips from the Round-house down to the station, pick people up, take them up to a museum, bring them back down. Well, that didn’t happen because insurance back then was $85,000 before we even did anything else, so that went out the window and we decided to make it astatic thing.
“We started with just those basic things and we’ve built on it ever since. Everything we’ve got up there now worked out of Junee or through Junee. Everything that we have is history. It’s historical. It’s old. Most of it’s 100 or over years old. We’ve got steam engines. We’ve got diesel locomotives. We’ve got carriages. We’ve got a steam crane. We’ve got rail motor, you name it we’ve pretty much got it and also we’ve turned the old what was the amenities block into a part of the museum as well and it has a really good working model train in there.
“We’ve had a few grants recently, which is great and that’s enabled us to get into this century with IT and we’ve got an old red rattler that’s painted green, a very old one, and that’s our project coming up now to to install that. We are moving all the time, we’re improving all the time, there was nothing up there. It was just ash. The ground was just as hand no gardens nothing, we’ve established all the gardens even on the railway workshop side because we were in that building originally and then WHNS made us move because there was a live line we were crossing to get people in, so we had to start all over again on the other side where we are now. But we’ve established gardens, trees, and picnic areas. It’s a lovely spot to visit.
“Last year we had over 25,000 visitors which is bringing a lot of money into Junee. Our entry fee is very low, that most people from everywhere else tell us it is. At the moment we’re doing okay but people come for a weekend they stay in the caravan park or the motels, they eat downtown, they purchase things hopefully in the shops so we are a really big tourist operation compared to a lot of things in the Riverina.”
-Jack Murray
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