The anti-bullet train: Rugged Aussie rail journey where the top speed is 20km/h

As I nibble on paprika-crusted walnuts from inside the West Coast Wilderness Railway’s heated premium carriage on the Queenstown stretch of Tasmania’s 130-year-old train line, I estimate that the deluge pounding our steam train and the surrounding cold-climate rainforest must be inching near the three-metre annual average.

We’ve not yet departed Queenstown Station, which houses the railway’s ticket centre, cafe, museum and workshop for the eight-strong fleet of locomotives, but the team is busy in preparation.

Ken Fairbairn, who spent over a decade as officer-in-charge of Queensland’s remote Gulflander railway route, is our driver for the three-hour journey. As the whistle sounds and the steam billows, we peel past corrugated-green-roofed houses and garden fences, a sheep lounging on a patio, and a fellow who pulls back his curtain to wave us off.

“Steam locos are totally manual,” Ken says. “As a driver or fireman, you’ve got to be on the ball with everything. It’s very hands-on.”

That’s a theme out here. In Queenstown’s early days of colonial expansion, it took doggedness, perseverance and reported foolishness to trek through the endlessness separating the midlands from the western coast. Many deemed it impenetrable, so thickset and unforgiving were its foliage and ferns. A series of pioneering prospectors saw opportunity and, feuds aside, Mount Lyell Mining & Railway Company began copper operations in 1893 following relatively fruitless gold endeavours. It became a vital industry for the region.

The challenge of the wild was felt acutely when miners had to figure out how to connect Mount Lyell’s bountiful output with the world, a problem solved by a railway between Queenstown and the coastal port of Strahan, from where ships would sail out of Macquarie Harbour. The railway was built over 18 months by 500 men – some documented in three-piece suits with pocket watches in one hand and tools in the other, images that feature at Queenstown’s incomparable Eric Thomas Galley Museum.

It’s an exceptional feat by any measure, but especially considering the conditions: dreary, endless, blanketing rain with no shelters for respite, overpriced food and provisions, and steep, slippery inclines and descents across the rainforest. But they did it, which makes my concerns about a soaked beanie and sodden Blundstones from an off-train jaunt in the drizzle feel particularly pale.

At our slowest, we travel five kilometres an hour; at our fastest, we’re hitting 20 kilometres. These routes were designed for heavy haulage, Ken reminds me, not speed. While the locomotives are original and have remained operational – plus or minus a few repairs – since the 1890s, the carriages are a labour of replication: soft sconce lighting sets the mood in the timber-lined space, with green seats and tables that we share with another couple.

Huge windows frame the landscape as we pick up pace and venture out of Queenstown, the canopy of mossy myrtle beeches crowding the sky above us. Steam mingles with the fog and the sideways-streaming rain, but we’re toasty inside. Less so Ken, who occasionally leans out of engine space to monitor conditions.

“It’s fun. I’m driving this thing, it’s 130 years old, and there’s 80 people behind me enjoying themselves,” he says. “You can’t do that in many other places.”

And this, of course, is not any other place. It’s the rugged, remote Tasmanian west, where the rallying cry for those who built this railway became “find a way or make it”. The solution for these steep outcrops was the Abt rack-and-pinion system, designed by Swiss clock maker-turned-engineer Carl Roman Abt and purchased by Bowes Kelly, the mining company’s fearless leader. A third central rail runs along the middle of the steepest part of the track and features teeth that engage with cogs beneath the locomotive. A normal rail incline would be about 1:30, meaning the train moves up one unit for every 30 units forward. When this train engages the rack – at Halls Creek, about eight kilometres from Queenstown – it’s at 1:16. We wouldn’t be able to get up (or down, for the system’s braking effect is a huge safety win) a hill this steep, Ken tells me, without Abt’s invention.

Nor without fuel of our own. Between station stops, staff ferry around a menu curated by chef Rodney Dunn of New Norfolk’s Agrarian Kitchen. Served to premium carriages and representing producers and farmers from across the state, the centrepiece – a ploughman’s-style snacking plate – features wild-shot wallaby brisket from Lenah Game Meats or pork-and-wallaby terrine, La Cantara cheese (a smokey, paprika-rubbed aged cheese or a semi-hard goat’s milk washed in local pinot noir, depending on the route), blackberry jam or pepperberry quince paste, rustic crackers and discs of pickled onions.

“The railway is something that brings together so many people, so many different skilsets. The railway really only operates” – then and now – “because of the collaboration of all of those people,” Dunn says. Blackberry brambles fringe the railway as we chug along, planted by railway workers and picked by their children, with plentiful jam once made and “synonymous with the West Coast”. Dunn chose to continue the tradition.

It’s markedly different to what the railway men, or “navvies”, ate: wallaby or wombat meat with a side of button grass. Rodney ponders a future of button-grass scones but, for now, we stick to plain scones with hot tea, which await us after a stop at Lynchford spent panning for gold. When the Abt system clicks into gear, we begin the ascent through saturated vegetation that feels more Jurassic by the gauge.

The squeak of brakes, my companion notes, sounds like a donkey, braying and hawing as we rise through the undergrowth. As the amorphous wilderness closes in, the surrounding earthen walls seemingly an inch from the train, it is not unreasonable to think a thylacine might be watching us from behind the celery-top pine. The track wiggles through bulging and thinning outcrops, and our carriage’s reverent silence is interrupted only by a limp branch clawing across the top of the train.

The replica station at Rinadeena hosts outdoor exhibits and shunting-viewing platforms, which we explore while nibbling on a chocolate-coated leatherwood honey mini ice-cream by Pure Pops, the Sydney-based creamery started by two women from Launceston. The journey demands 6000 litres of water; at Rinadeena, where the rainfall is consistently constant, an onsite tank collects it to refill the coffers.

Foamy white clouds balloon into the canopy as the train whistles, and as we line up to alight, it begins to hail stones the size of shrunken peas. (Oh, what endurance those navvies must’ve had to see the railway’s potential while their boots were drilled with draining holes and their toes were covered in leeches and their hands were raw from lunging a pickaxe.)

Back on board, our steward gives out postcards and pens to scribe the journey as tea and chocolates – a hempseed-and-hazelnut combination – are distributed to lubricate the mind. We glide along the banks of the Queen River. She flows orange and froths off-white, unable to sustain life 30 years after mining ceased. Where Queenstown once fell victim to the acid rain that showered it, turning the landscape almost lunar, nature has sprouted anew. Not so in the river.

The rain heavies, the stretch of rail disappearing into the shower as we return to our Queenstown terminus. The 45-minute drive to Strahan takes us past scarred red and yellow rock faces and delivers us to Risby Cove, a boutique hotel built on the site of a former sawmill and recently renovated under new ownership.

Tall Pine Lime Splice-inspired cocktails briefly transport us to warmer climes and we nibble on ocean trout beneath massive timber beams. Trees sway and fold as we crawl into bed, and the rain belts the tin roof. Overnight, the power cuts out across town and we awake to the peach light of the pier plunged into inky blackness. It’s back on by the time we head to Regatta Point by mid-morning, where Strahan’s arm of the heritage railway begins.

The fully seated Cryptic Falls Express features a diesel locomotive that follows the curve of Macquarie Harbour before creeping into the rainforest and inching towards the eponymous waterfall, which spits and churns with the rain from the night before. The diesel trains were ordered from England’s Vulcan Foundry in 1953 and shipped to Tasmania way back when, “a really early design in the evolution of diesel locomotives”.

“It’s amazing we still have them,” Ken says of the fleet, which was sold off and sent as far as Lithgow before being reclaimed by the West Coast Wilderness Railway for this chapter. “Years and years later, they came home.”

THE DETAILS

TRAIN
Trains depart from Strahan and Queenstown most days. The direct route between the two termini is not operational at present due to repairs on the line. The Agrarian Kitchen menu runs until April 2027. Fares for the Queenstown route are $95 for standard carriages or $135 for premium, which includes the Agrarian Kitchen menu, and $40/$80 for Strahan. See wcwr.com.au

TOUR
The Eric Thomas Galley Museum is run by volunteers and is open daily. Admission is $10 for adults, $16 for a couple and $25 for a family. See westcoasttas.com.au

STAY
Risby Cove Boutique Hotel is located on the harbourfront in Strahan. Rooms start at $495, including breakfast. Of the 12 rooms, one is accessible. See risbycove.com.au

DRIVE
By car, Queenstown is about five hours from Hobart, three-and-a-half hours from Launceston or three hours from Devonport. Roads can be affected by snow and storms. Check local updates on the TasAlert app or at alert.tas.gov.au

The writer was a guest of West Coast Wilderness Railway and Risby Cove.