Puffing Billy Railway Visitor Centre

Puffing Billy Railway is a 1900’s heritage steam railway and has operated successfully as a much-loved tourist operation since 1955 in the Dandenong Ranges, 40 kilometres east of Melbourne, Australia. Emerald Lake Park is a scenic destination for many, centrally located on the railway and the site for a new Visitor Centre consisting of a café, commercial kitchen, visitor information services, interpretations, function rooms, staff offices, retail, educational facilities, and amenities. The project brings together train enthusiasts and local park goers, creating a unique tourism amenity offering which collects the many users of the site in a single but complex building. Often in tourism projects there is pressure to build a new experience, or ‘icon’ where there is not one already. The challenge for this project was to enhance the already iconic Puffing Billy Railway by adding new dimensions and experiences that do not replace or stand out from that which exists, but which builds upon those qualities that have made it so successful. The strategy was to focus on existing characteristics of the railway, creating a visitor experience anchored within the authentic sights, smells and sounds of the railway. The design also responds specifically to the two unique landscape contexts; the native bushland behind, and European park landscape the building overlooks. The complex brief resulted in a building larger than would have historically been located on the railway line. The decision was made to design a new spatial experience and a unique geometry that is distinct from the old train stations, but one that depended on the relationship between visitors and the train platform for its organisational logic. The building is not detached from, but intrinsically grows out of the existing Lakeside Station, extending the platform through the new building. Along this platform, the complex programmatic and operational brief is arranged and regularly switches back to mimic the railway journey. In providing a new destination and negotiating between two contrasting landscapes, the visitor centre is an instrument through which multiple dimensions of the site can be experienced. The linear arrangement is simple, legible, and accessible to the many types of visitors. Running parallel to the ‘carriage-like’ programmatic functions is a single elongated internal circulation space with uninterrupted trackside views and featuring a timber finish with an imprinted rhythm of structure that is inspired by the long winding trestle bridges that are so important for the Puffing Billy experience. Thus, connection to place both physical and psycho spatial. In an interpretive sense, the visitor moves from the wider immersive landscape to a more specific journey into the world of Puffing Billy - a journey of enquiry and discovery into the natural environment, the trains, and the people of the Railway. The building’s cladding resembles the signature black steam locomotives and recedes into the dark native bushland, with a continuous window trackside and occasional pleat-like openings in the enclosure hinting at the interior. It is a silhouette backdrop, grounded in place, to the hero that is the Puffing Billy Railway experience.