Wee Macgregor railway tunnel

We turned off the main road at the remnants of the Ballara town site. The drive through to Hightville was a rough track that needs to be driven carefully.

The sign at the end of the "good" road warns of a few things. From that point is "extreme" 4WD tracks, don't go off the track, don't walk off the track. The orange star pickets mark the track.

The area is apparently honeycombed with open shafts and more. When they say extreme 4WD, they are not kidding. We drove halfway up the hill, picking our way through rocks and ruts carefully then parked and walked the last 400m to the tunnel.

The tunnel is quite a feat of hand-excavated mountain side. Thousands of tonnes of rock, gravel and dirt dug and moved, cut and filled. Grades each side are very steep making me wonder how the engine hauled the wagons up the 2 foot lines. Perhaps there was a rack drive on parts. The engine drivers were certainly brave. One slip with the brake lever and the trip down would be fast and potentially fatal. Steel on steel don't stick well anyway.

In the tunnel were some small bats. One fairly common and sometimes a more rare species. They were momentarily disturbed when we passed but quickly resumed their afternoon siesta.

On the other side of the tunnel the old abandoned mine is visible. Rail cuttings are even steeper than the other side and are harder work to walk. The hills seem to have benches cut along everywhere. This would have been an active place around the turn of the previous century. The Hightville cemetery notes several tragic accidental deaths around the early 1900's.Read more