On Tuesday night, the Goulburn Motor Cycle Club had a meeting, during which they informed members and interested parties about the recent progress of the long-awaited track which is now under construction.
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President of the club, Richard Toparis, said that they have just finished dumping the first load of fill from the Mariam College site.
“We’ve been assisted there by the developer of that site, so we’ve taken a heap of fill up to the track,” he said.
“We’ve had it dumped ready for distribution around the track, so we’ve got about 900 metres of the track with some fill on there.”
The track is 2,100 metres in total, so they still need another 1,200 metres of fill before they can cover the entirety.
Toparis said that the project was originally estimated to finish late this year, however due to time delays they are running a couple of months behind.
“We’d like to have the track all complete and have some sort of limited use by September,” he said.
“We’d like to have some sort of mock ride day just so that we can see how it all goes together, how it’s all working, because we’d like to have a regular season so to speak by 2019.”
It is a relief for Toparis to finally see the track under construction, as he has been trying to complete this project for over a decade, but has been impeded by various legal proceedings and holdups with council.
“We had a facility approved in Collector way back in 2004,” Toparis said.
“In the eleventh hour some objectors got the better of us there on a site that we had council approval on a track there.
“We’ve been working on this site here now for five or six years. We were two years in the court unfortunately, but we liaise with council and they were pretty good.
“That all took its course, and we were approved in the council chamber way back in 2013 and then we retracted it and then we re-lodged it because of the objectors with slight variations which were more pleasing to the surrounding people.”
Although Toparis did admit that “I wish I was 20 years younger”, he said that to finally have the project nearing completion will be beneficial for young riders in Goulburn.
“It’s all good for the kids, there’ll be generations to come now that’ll utilise this.”
Additionally, the club intends to divide the use of the track with several other Goulburn entities.
“The motorcycle club is talking with the council now also [about] some combined user groups,” Toparis said.
“So we’ve got the cycle club with the mountain biking and we’re working together with the speedway and the legend cars and a few other organisations to have a bit of infrastructure up there.”
The site is located off Sydney Road, adjacent to the speedway.