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The Lost Railway of South Woy Woy
" Every resident of the Peninsula will tell you late
at night you can hear the trains whistle
as they break the head of Woy Woy Tunnel , but sometimes late at night you
will hear a
distant rumble of the old crusher chute and the forlorn whistle of
the lonely No.2 loco
left at the top of the hill ..... "
Abandoned skip car 1978
In
1927 work began on the construction of a mine at the current tip
site in the hills at South Woy Woy by Basalt Quarries Ltd. A gang of
30 men worked to make the small gauge railway that would lead from
the top of the current tip area down around the hills to a crusher
chute just above the current water treatment works at South Woy Woy.
This line was serviced by a small steam locomotive called " No. 2 "
, the lower line to the rail head used a steam powered shunt to move
the cars into position for loading.
Here the rock would be crushed and turned into " blue metal gravel "
and the finished product would then be shipped on a second railway
at the bottom of the incline to the rail head at the mouth of Woy
Woy Tunnel. The whole operation was quite secretive and the council
was upset the roads into the site were being destroyed by heavy
equipment being shipped in.
Councillor Staples was most vocal about this and I suspect it was
because he was still quite passionate about the road in this area as
it was the first road into Woy Woy that he himself had blazed
through the bush several years earlier.
The whole operation only ran for 2 years before the mine closed for
unknown reasons in 1929 and abandoned , a few years later gangs
moved in and removed all the equipment , locomotives and they were
sold off.
The gang removing No. 2 were scared the last trestle bridge would
collapse when they finally brang the train to its head , so they
connected ropes to the controls and led it like a dog across the
bridge with no one on board , a sigh of relief was heard as it
safely made it across the neglected rusty bridge.
There is still a lot of evidence of the mine today up in the bush at
South Woy Woy , old rail tracks , the crusher chute , remains of
trestle bridges and an abandoned skip carriage in the bush , the
area is in Brisbane Water National Park accessed through Woy Woy
Tip.
Loco No.2 lays waiting
for scrap
1930's
Overgrowing tracks 1930's
*View
recent 2008 photos of the site
here
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