Emu Bay
Railway |
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The Emu Bay Railway had a number of things
to endear it to me. There's the name itself for one thing: in a nation where
railways were once dominated by Such and Such Government Railways, to the
bland corporate names of today which seem too ashamed to proclaim their rail
business, the mellifluous Emu Bay Railway has a rare association with its
immediate geography. Then there were family trips on the mixed trains the
railway used to operate from the mines to the coast. More recently, at least
until the guards vans were dropped, it maintained a willingness to welcome
travellers on the daily ore trains, even if the accommodation was rather
sparse and the timetable less than passenger friendly. It had a brace of
snappy looking diesel hydraulics as its motive power, and it projected an
air of well-maintained efficiency, especially compared to parts of the Tasrail
of the era! It evolved an operating pattern where but one daily train sufficed,
all sixty odd wagons wrapped around the mountains, led by up to nine locos!
And of course the scenery provided many opportunities for finding spectacular
settings.
All the while, it quietly went about its business of bringing the
ores of the west coast to the port of Burnie on the Emu Bay, usually unremarked
but for the citizens of the handful of towns it ran through.
The photos shown here were all taken in the mid 1980s, before the
opening of the extension to the new mine at Hellyer. Today the railway continues
to function in much the same way, although the vans are gone, the mine at
Hellyer has closed, and the name itself has been overtaken by the railway's
absorption into Tasrail. Its attraction remains powerful!
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