Swamp Rail Last Steam
Newcastle Herald
Thursday January 17, 2002
IT'S Newcastle's railway to nowhere. Bisecting the vast Hexham swamp with an earth embankment dating back to 1856, it now stands desolate and forgotten with rusting rails.
It was the first link of the historic Richmond Vale Railway to open and the last to close, 14 years ago.
But this six-kilometre raised rail line, probably built by poor Irish, English, Welsh and Scots immigrants, could yet live again some day. The unique flood-free track may surprise us all to rise Lazarus-like as part of a suggested new Hexham-to-Fassifern rail freight line.
This abandoned Hexham to west Minmi stretch of private railway line became Australia's last commercial steam train operation before it closed on October 15, 1987.
Part of the former J & A Brown coal empire, the wetland railway used to attract stream train enthusiasts from right around Australia.
And there was a lot of unexpected public interest at its demise. That was when 18 engine drivers staged a protest over the line's sudden closure by Coal & Allied Industries Ltd.
Defiant employees commandeered an 84-ton RVR steam locomotive and blockaded the line for three weeks.
The captive engine, No 25, stood gently puffing steam under a hot sun with its Eureka flag rakishly fluttering while visitors took snapshots. Some 7000 signed a petition to save the line.
But it all came to nothing. Australia's oldest working steam line, with its 13 engines, closed and all coal was soon moved from the nearby Stockrington Colliery by truck instead.
Today, the wilds of Inner Mongolia seem a very strange place for the last refuge of the world's steam trains. But it may well be.
Steam trains still chug along the 945km-long Jitong railway to the delight of rail buffs.
But even in China's remotest region, the days of the noisy, sooty steam engines are also probably numbered. The central Government wants to get rid of all steam locomotives in the country in the next five years.
Sydney writer John Schauble, who visited Mongolia recently, said that although some 5000 QJ-class engines were built, the last was in 1989.
Perhaps ominously, QJ is short for Qian Jin, meaning `go forward', maybe to diesel or electric power.
But back home, near the tiny township of Minmi, you'd never know at first glance that the Richmond Vale Railway ever existed.
The branch line into Minmi was pulled up decades ago and the main line leaves the swamp and disappears inland for another 5km to the old Stockrington Colliery site.
Bush walkers glancing north along the rail embankment from the Minmi Junction see almost nothing today except for swans, rabbits and birdlife.
No longer can they spot stream trains chugging up and down the line from Hexham wharves towards the old mine at the foothills of the Sugarloaf range 11km away.
No more do intriguing black silhouettes soon become recognisable as bulky 2-8-2 tank class locomotives, trailing white plumes of steam and hauling up to 50 rust-red, wooden coal hoppers.
Walking the line today is disappointing. There're only overgrown rails, exposed dog spikes, six decaying bridges, snakes, a lonely sea of reeds rustling in the wind and an upturned coal hopper overgrown by brambles.
Steam locos once used to rumble, hiss and clatter along this line, even in peak floodtime, despite water rising on both sides of the rail embankment. Then it seemed truly isolated, like Stockton breakwater.
The causeway, spearing across the low, swampy land to distant Hexham, became the origin of the mysterious joke `Surf's up at Minmi breakwater'.
T HE original railway from Minmi across the swamp to Hexham opened in 1856 as a tramway for pastoralist John Eales. The firm of J & A Brown took it over in 1859. Then in 1906, Hunter coal baron John Brown connected his Pelaw Main and showpiece Richmond Main collieries, both near Kurri, with the Minmi to Hexham swamp line.
The whole 26.5km line to Kurri became known as the Richmond Vale Railway.
Closer to Minmi, `Baron' Brown even had his own rail siding built near his farm and created two dams in the hillside opposite. These dams doubled as his private shooting gallery when he fancied a bit of waterfowl for dinner.
Since 1991, the closest most Hunter Valley people get to the steam era is a train ride at the Richmond Vale Railway Museum, 4km south of Kurri Kurri. Chances are the loco belching smoke hauling the passenger carriages was one of the ones last used on the original Hexham-Stockrington line.
Now, next month, Channel Ten is set to screen a new documentary by Hunter film maker David Threlfo. It's called Return to Steam and will recall the glory days of these old workhorses.
© 2002 Newcastle Herald