Explaining Eumungerie...

Its Sunday night, so its not time for a lengthy post.  So I thought I'd add just a little to how the railway’s identity at this location shifted through several guises during the early years.  

During the construction phase the location was known as Coalbaggie Siding, principally so as to distinguish it from the settlement at Coalbaggie Creek which was approximately ten kilometres away.   
This distance somewhat questions the rationale for the use of Coalbaggie Siding .  Ten kilometres is not an insubstantial distance to walk from the Siding to the Creek , where several sly-grog shanties were reputed to exist.  Doubtless a mis-informed traveller would have developed a suitable thirst after such a walk.

 At the station’s opening on 18 February 1903 the location was designated as Coalbaggie Creek.  Three months later in May 1903 the station was designated as Eumungerie, although it was also described clearly on a 1905 parish map as Eumungerie Siding.  Later versions of the Parish Maps published in 1913 describe the station by its final and current name, simply Eumungerie.

The name Eumungerie was not adopted uniformly by other Commonwealth and State agencies at the time it was adopted by the Railway Commissioners  It appears that the post office was known as Eumungerie for at least 18 months before the station carried this name.  Similarly, the school’s transition to ‘Eumungerie Public School’ occurred in late 1904.  Earlier it too had carried the Coalbaggie nomenclature as ‘Coalbaggie Provisional School’.

So, spare a thought for a long-forgotten mail clerk attached to the Western Mail, trying to decipher jthe intended destinations of letters in his charge.