The title is not just a play on words, although I did try to get the centre line of the ceiling in the centre of the photograph. (As much I could without getting in people's way, anyway.) The guy walking straight down the centre toward me was mostly a coincidence, though I did wait until he was pretty much in the centre of the frame.

Sydney Central Station sits on the southern end of the central business district.

This is the third (and most successful) try at creating a central station for Sydney. The first was in 1855. It supported the rail line between Sydney and Parramatta, the "second city" of the then-colony some 25km to the west. It was a rough construction of wood and corrugated iron, which was built in a hurry.

It was a terminus; trains came in and went back out on the same tracks. There was no space to run trains any further into the city itself.

In 1874 it was replaced by a new building which was built of brick, and which had two platforms.

That was also a terminus.

This one, which was planned and built between 1900 and 1906, was a much grander building with many platforms, and (eventually) a clock tower that could be seen from miles around. It was located about a block north compared to its predecessors, on the northern side of a street called Devonshire Street. There was a problem. There was a cemetery there.

The cemetery was reclaimed with most of the roughly 30,000 bodies being moved to other cemeteries. Well, except for some that were found during the metro line upgrades in 2021. And some ghosts that are reputed to haunt some of the tunnels under the station.

The station has changed over time. Underground tunnels running down the eastern side of the CBD were introduced in the 1920s. Underground tunnels leading down the western side followed in the 1930s. Those ones continued over the newly opened Sydney Harbour Bridge, and connected with the north shore rail line meaning that Central was no longer a terminus but a through station.

The Grand Concourse has always been at the heart of the station. The look of it now is clean and sparse, similar to its original appearance in 1906. Similar, but not identical. The digital destination board on the right is something that they could only have dreamed of in 1906. (The original was a huge wooden board with analogue clocks showing departure times over lists of stops painted on rotating wooden blocks.)

It didn't always look like this. In the 1950s and 1960s there were huge neon signs hanging from the ceiling. If you drink too much "McWilliams Wines", you could "Take Vincent's APC With Confidence!". (Vincent's was a compound analgesic powder called "APC". That is, aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine. Powders like these were banned in the 1980s because they were both addictive and harmful.)

Part of me misses those signs, but most of me prefers the nice clean, open lines of the modern station.