Custodian: University of Glasgow Library Special Collections

Reference: Dougan 103, item 7

The photograph shows a side view of Goulburn Railway Station with a train, a locomotive number 20 with a long line of freight carriages.

The railway arrived in Goulburn in 1868. It was the first town west of the Eastern Highland mountains to be reached by railway on the route between Sydney and Canberra.

Photographer: not known

Material: albumen print photograph

Dimensions: 259 x 360mm

Condition: It is likely that the was toned. There is no fading.

Collection information: Dougan 103 comprises an album of scenes of Australia, particularly New South Wales, and appears to belong with album Dougan 104. The photographs are believed to date largely from the 1870s and records the rapidly growing and flourishing colonial Australia.

It has been possible to identify some locations and photographers, including work by Charles Nettleton (1826-1902) and Charles Pickering (fl. 1870) largely due to the National Library of Australia's Trove website.

All the prints in Dougan 103 look to be contact printed from wet collodion glass plate negatives. This process was challenging because the plate had to be prepared immediately before use, exposed while still moist and developed directly afterwards. Away from the studio, which would be the case with the majority of the photographs in this album, meant that the photographer had to have a portable darkroom. For photographers in wilder and less accessible landscapes a dark-tent would have to be used presenting a considerable challenge especially when taking into consideration the large size of the glass plates. Some prints indicate that there may have been problems with the collodion and a practice on some prints has been to mask out the sky area making it appear white. This may have been because of blemishes left which can be seen on Dougan 103, item 40. This may have been a practice by a particular photographer.