Type : Station
Line : North Coast Line
Distance from Sydney : 672.616km
Opened : 12 October 1915
Closed : 6 July 1974
Status : Closed
Name meaning : After the place of the same name in Greece. So called by the surveyor (a Mr Wilson) who served in the Greek army during the Greek war of independence under General Woodford (hence Woodford Island in the same area)
Notes : 436 metre central iterlocked crossing loop. Up side platform was 76.2 metres in lenth and held an A4 station building, a J3 station officer's residence was constructed. Prior to 1935 the loop size was reduced and the relaid again on 4/7/1935. 9/4/1962 - goods siding and loop removed. There is no settlement within the vicinty of the station.
Lanitza Station location - opened 1915, closed 1974. There are no houses within cooee of this one! (Six Maps)
1929 article on Lanitza
Peter Osborne:
It's hard to imagine that there was ever a community there, given how isolated it is now.
Lance Lyon:
Peter Osborne very true - but it also shows why so many of the small stations closed in the 70s and 80s. The few that held on ended up closing once CTC was rolled out.
Lance Lyon:
Peter, also, it doesn't appear on the 1972 timetable, so guessing it fell out of use prior to then.
Ken Date:
Lanitza closed as a crossing loop in 1962 but the station, signal posts and the loop were still in place well into the 1970s (as was sometimes the case in those days). Perhaps they were left in situ in case of a need to reactivate at some point? I recall it as a lonely location and I don't remember anything else beyond the station in the neighbourhood.
Jeremy Williams:
I don't remember who told me, but I was informed the army used the siding there during WW2 and there was also an airstrip nearby?
Lance Lyon:
Jeremy Williams there was suposed to be an airstrip, but the land was unsuitable and it never went ahead. It was first raised in 1948. Other sites considered included Ulmarra. The Lanitza site wasn't suitable due to two problems - hills and floods. Ultimately it opened in 1959 around 10km northeast of Grafton as "Clarence Valley Regional Airport".
Interestingly, it shows up in 1911 although it didn't open until 1915.
Lanitza, undated (Steve Greenwald)
Lanitza, just to the South of the junction of the Glenugie Peak Quarry Tramway (supplied)
Greg Lee:
Eddie Tracey (who was a fettler at Lanitza) told me a couple of stories.
The fettlers regularly used herbicides to control vegetation, and the stuff they used back then was more deadly than what you can buy now. One day word came through from the DE's office that the herbicide they were using was not to be used any more. They had a part 44 gallon drum of it in the trolley shed poison room, and since they weren't allowed to use it any more, they emptied the drum on the ground near the trolley shed. Eddie reckoned that nothing grew there for years.
One of the fettlers was an alcoholic, but he couldn't drink in front of his wife. So he he kept his grog in the dunny, under the wooden "thunder box". Apparently his wife didn't know about it, but the other fettlers did.