Copley railway station, South Australia

The Copley railway station was opened between 1881 and 1882 as Leigh Creek railway station during the construction of the railway from Port Augusta to Government Gums (now Farina).[1] It was located south of Telford railway station. The town of Leigh Creek was built next to Telford railway station to support the coal mine, while the town of Copley was built next to Leigh Creek railway station. This prompted the renaming of the station to Copley in 1916.[2]

The narrow-gauge railway south of Leigh Creek was under pressure from coal trains, with the coal trains getting heavier as time went on. A solution was needed to help increase capacity for the coal trains, with multiple options being identified for a standard gauge railway. These included upgrading the existing line to Leigh Creek or making a new railway that ran to the west of the Flinders Ranges, bypassing the Pichi Richi Pass. It was eventually chosen to build the new railway, and it opened to Leigh Creek in 1956 and Marree in 1957, with Copley being one of the places where the 2 lines crossed over.[3] From then on, the original narrow-gauge alignment was progressively abandoned, with the Port Augusta to Hawker alignment finally being closed in 1972.[4] As part of the new standard-gauge railway, the station was rebuilt with a brick station building similar to those at Telford and Marree, and a goods platform.

Regular passenger services through the town ceased when The Ghan was rerouted via Tarcoola, ending the need for an SG connection service through Copley. However, passengers could still use the station via a mixed goods service operating through to Marree until 1985, when this was replaced by a goods-only service.[5] The service was curtailed to Copley in June 1987 and stopped operating in the mid-1990s. This left the Leigh Creek coal train as the only service on the line, but this did not service Copley. The coal train's only customer, the coal-fired power stations near Port Augusta closed in 2016. Mining at the coalfields ceased in 2015, though trains continued to transport the remainder of the coal until 2016.[6]

Today, the standard gauge station building, goods platform, and water column survive. The line from Stirling North to Telford Cut remains intact, and Flinders Power handed the line back to the state government in 2017.[7]