Old Como railway bridge  The Old Como railway bridge is a heritage-listed former railway bridge and now footbridge and water main carrier over the Georges River in Oatley in the Georges River Council local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by John Whitton and Dept of Railways and built from 1883 to 1885 by C. and E. Millar. The property is owned by Sydney Water, an agency of the Government of New South Wales. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 15 November 2002. Oatley was named after a man who never lived in the area. James Oatley (1770-1839) a convict clock maker arrived in the colony on 27 January 1815 to serve a life sentence. The clock at Hyde Park Barracks, built between 1817–19, included a clock made by Oatley. When he was pardoned he received several land grants. One, granted in 1833, was near the George's River. He called the property Needwood Forest, after woodlands in his native Warwickshire in England. Oatley never built on the land, but lived on a farm called Snugsborough near Beverly Hills. It stood in a grant received in 1831. He died in 1839, and was buried at Snugsborough, where his grave was found in 1921. Needwood Forest passed to Frederick, his third son, who sold it to Charles Cecil Griffiths in 1881. The property extended from Gungal Bay on the suburb's western edge, to the later Boundary and Hurstville Roads. When the Hurstville to Sutherland railway line passed through Oatley's old property in the 1880s, the station, opened in 1886, took his name, as did Oatley Bay and Oatley Park, a favourite picnic spot for local residents. The Old Como railway bridge was completed in 1885 as a part of the original Illawarra railway line infrastructure. It is a very fine example of a single track steel lattice girder bridge of the 1870s and 1880s. Como is the longest single track steel lattice girder bridge in NSW and the only such bridge within of Sydney. It was a notorious bottleneck within five years of its completion when the single track on either side of the bridge was increased to a double track. The double tracks converged to a single "gauntlet track" on the bridge, which enabled trains to cross in either direction without chain points and with a relative degree of safety.