Central Railway Station, Sydney

Central opened on 4 August 1906 without the thing everybody now pictures. The clock started at 10.22 in the morning on 12 March 1921, fifteen years late, which means these photographs fall either side of a line you can see. The view across Railway Square in 1910 shows a terminus with nothing above its roofline; the watercolour looking across the same square in 1923 has the tower standing over the morning traffic.

It was built on a cemetery. The Devonshire Street burial ground was resumed in 1901 to make room, and the sandstone frontage that went up where the graves had been is Walter Liberty Vernon's, the Government Architect working alongside Henry Deane, the railway engineer whose scheme put twelve platforms behind it and made room for forty thousand passengers, twice the old station's.

It was the third station on the line out of Sydney. The 1855 terminus, from which the colony's first railway ran to Parramatta Junction, stood just south of here; its formal name was Sydney, though everyone called it Redfern. Look for the horse-drawn wagon of bagged goods crossing its tracks, and the elevated 1870s views over the yards toward Darling Harbour — the enlarged station the 1890s would outgrow.

What the camera kept going back to was the concourse. Views taken through the 1920s look across the same arched glass-and-steel roof at travellers under a suspended clock, ticket windows, a bookstall, and hanging advertisements for Norco butter and Great Western champagne. Up on the roofline the advertising was bigger still — sky-signs standing on steel frames above the brick storeys, hoardings for Askey's "House of Lords" Scotch whisky and Vicars' of Marrickville, meant to be read from streets away.

On 7 July 1937 the Silver City Comet, the first air-conditioned train in Australia, ran a trial from Sydney to Moss Vale before entering service between Parkes and Broken Hill that September. Its driver leans out of the cab window at the platform, waiting to go.

Then there is the station that was never built at all — Norman Selfe's drawing of the city railway he proposed between 1887 and 1894, a Sydney that went another way.