From railway station to Riverbank hotel

Most hotel histories start with a ribbon. This one starts with a platform. Before there was a hotel on Festival Drive or a casino on North Terrace, there was Adelaide’s main railway station, and its sandstone building still holds the complex together.

Sources: the history of the station and casino below comes from Wikipedia’s articles on Adelaide railway station and Adelaide Casino, which we treat as secondary sources. Facts about Eos itself come from the hotel’s pages and SkyCity’s announcements.

The station of 1928

Adelaide’s first railway station opened on the North Terrace site in 1856, serving the line to Port Adelaide. By the 1920s it had outgrown itself, and the state railways chose a design by the local architecture firm Garlick & Jackson for a replacement. The foundation stone was laid on 24 August 1926 and the building was completed in 1928: a large sandstone block in neo-classical style, with the railways’ administration in its upper storeys and, at its heart, a domed Marble Hall that served as the main waiting room. The rebuilding ran well over budget and became a source of controversy as the state headed into the Depression.

The casino of 1985

As rail traffic shrank, much of the great building fell quiet. In December 1985 the Adelaide Casino opened inside the heritage-listed station, with the Marble Hall incorporated into it. Trains kept running from platforms beneath. The casino later took the SkyCity name, and today the Marble Hall is home to Chandelier Bar, whose custom chandelier of more than 2,000 hand-blown Italian glass bubbles hangs above the room.

The Riverbank years

From 2015, the Riverbank precinct between North Terrace and the Torrens was redeveloped, taking in the convention centre, the Festival Centre and Festival Plaza. The casino announced an expansion in 2018 aimed at turning it into an integrated entertainment destination on the Festival Plaza forecourt, and the work, reported at around $330 million, was largely complete in 2020 and 2021.

What survives, and what is new

Walk through the complex today and you move between the two eras. North Terrace still presents the station’s sandstone face; the North Terrace entrance brings you in on that side. Eos faces the other way, onto Festival Drive and the river, with its own driveway and a concourse reached by lift. Between them run the restaurants and bars, the events floor on Level 2 with its riverside Ballroom, and the art: SkyCity says more than 900 curated works by over 40 South Australian artists hang across the building, in glass, photography, painting and sculpture. One publication, quoted by the hotel, called Eos “secretly a great South Australian contemporary art gallery”.

Who owns it now

The complex belongs to SkyCity Entertainment Group. On 30 September 2026 the group said it would start a formal sale process for the Adelaide business, led by UBS, while stating there was no certainty of a transaction. Whatever happens next, the sandstone has already outlasted one complete change of purpose, from railway terminus to entertainment precinct.

If you like this sort of thing, pick up the hotel’s artwork collection guide, linked from its art page, before you explore the corridors.