The trolley on the railway near Bruce Railway Station

Bruce
Historic railway town south of Quorn
Located 334 km north of Adelaide, 40 km from Port Augusta and 293 metres above sea level, Bruce is a tiny railway station at the southern end of the main Flinders Ranges with a current population of four and a range of animals.

Prior to European settlement it is thought the Nugunu Aborigines lived in the area. The first European settlers arrived in the 1850s. The town of Bruce was officially laid out and declared a town in 1876. The town was named after a well-known farmer in the district although there is a view which says it was named after a friend of Governor Jervois. The County of Frome in which Bruce is situated is named after Captain E.C. Frome who succeeded Colonel Light as South Australia's Surveyor General. The county of Frome was proclaimed in 1851 and the Hundred of Willochra was proclaimed in 1875.

This was the line from Peterborough, the headquarters of the narrow gauge division of the South Australian Railways, to Quorn which was the southernmost point of the original Ghan train which slowly made its way towards Alice Springs. It finally reached Alice Springs in 1927.

At the time it was also part of the railway line from Sydney to Perth. A traveller would have gone from Sydney to Broken Hill then on to Peterborough and Quorn, down the Pitchi Richi Pass then onto Port Augusta and across the Nullarbor.

Bruce is the centre of the Willochra Plain. The plain was opened up for closer settlement in the 1860s. The land was resumed from the large sheep runs and each settler, in many cases from Britain and from Germany, was allocated 640 acres (a square mile) of land. They had to commit themselves to putting a dwelling on the land within two years. At the time it was covered with acacia and the first thing the farmers did was clear the land. This was based on the optimistic and inaccurate belief that 'rain followed the plough'. There was a tremendous drought from 1864-66 and there was further droughts in the 1880s and 1890s. By the 1890s any hope of making the Willochra Plain the granary of Australia was over. There had been a time when Hawker had been the last grain loading facility in the state.

The plan was that Bruce was going to be the largest town on the plain. It was expected to be larger than Quorn. Quorn developed more rapidly because by the 1860s-1870s there were 500-600 men working on the railways and living in Quorn.

The railway finally closed down in 1972. The last scheduled service was a goods passenger train and that was probably a wheat train. In 1973 the Pitchi Ritchi Railway Society was formed. It was originally formed to save the beautiful bridges and dry retaining walls down the Pitchi Richi Pass.

Things to see:  

Bruce Railway Station

Bruce Railway Station
In late 1986, when the railway station was pretty much in ruins, Tony Gwynn Jones and his wife, purchased the Bruce Railway Station. They revitalised the railway station in 1993 and opened for business in March 1994. They sold out recently and it is now owned and operated by new proprietors.