“More English than England herself” was how Anthony Trollope once described Tasmania. And so it sometimes still seems. In the lace-curtained cafes of Hobart, there are buttered scones and honey for tea. Church bells ring across meadows where plump cows graze And there are towns called Brighton, Beaconsfield and Launceston. The original settlers, it is said, wanted Tassie to sound like home – precisely because it is so far away.
But nothing prepares you for discovering Manchester Central station in almost as distant a location on the planet as it is possible to find – 9,000 miles from home. Here are steam trains that will transport you, not to cosy towns like Buxton or Matlock, but on a sensational journey to the coast of one the world’s last great virgin rainforests, where the next stop is Antarctica.
Few outside Australia have heard of the West Coast Wilderness Railway, and why should they? Rough weather and savage landscapes define this lonely part of south-west Tasmania. It is so remote that there are countless square miles of forest where people have literally never trodden. On the long drive through the mountains from Hobart, the rain sweeps horizontally across the mountains and tarns. My destination is Queenstown – as bleak and rough-hewn a little town as you will find anywhere in Australia. Just a few tin shacks and a bar, among mountains scorched white and treeless by acid rain from the local copper mines.
But here’s an extraordinary sight. Busying itself under a plume of steam is a spotless little tank loco in British Railways Brunswick green, at the head of three varnished coaches. A cross between Emmett and Oliver the Engine, it looks like an image summoned from a 1950s childhood Not exactly Hogwart’s Express departing from platform 9 3/4, but equally surreal – a scaled-down version of Manchester’s famous landmark – located on the moon.
No toy train this, though. The line ranks among the masterpieces of Victorian engineering – and the 35kmjourney to the coast – negotiating 1 in 20 gradients, along precipitous ledges, past trees older than Jesus Christ, rumbling over scary trestle bridges – is quite breathtaking. It fell into disuse in 1963, but was restored and reopened in 2003 ago at a cost of £12m.
Luckily, there is champagne, salmon-and cucumber sandwiches and fairy cakes on board to sustain passengers as we steam out of Queenstown. Necessary because the journey to Strahan will take the best part of a day. No such luxury for the original engineers of the line, which was built out of desperation in 1892 after the discovery of copper in the hills. With just packhorse trails and no roads, a new line to the coast was the only way to get it to market. But the odds were stacked against it – rough terrain, never before mapped, a harsh climate, and unproven technology.
The locos, including “Mount Lyell No1” (at the head of our train today) were acquired by mail order from the Glasgow firm of Dubs. One fell off the steamer in the harbour and still lies on the seabed. The rest arrived, IKEA-like, in kits of parts without instructions.
It is a tribute to the line’s engineers that three are still working today, more than a century later. But none was as ingenious as Dr Roman Abt, a Swiss inventor, who might sound like a support hosiery manufacturer, but whose technical genius becomes apparent as the little train starts to mount the steep inclines into the rainforest. The Abt system, where a cog under the loco engages in a third rail between the tracks, allows it to climb gradients of up to one in four.
Driver Mark Tregonning (descended from the tough Cornish tin miners who built the line) allows me to ride in the cab to see how it works. With sheet rain on front of us and the lush undergrowth almost growing before our eyes across the track, the conditions are like the ultimate testbed for “leaves on the line”. With a snort, a grunt and a vast sigh of steam, the cogs engage and the little engine settles into the Abt rail. In front of us, extending in the rain like the back of a diamond-studded dinosaur is the Abt rail.
Like everything else in Tasmania, there is a surreal contrast between the wild and the domestic, between the magical and the mundane. As the train rocks and wheezes ever higher, the vegetation presses into the carriages. Alongside the track are thousand year old huon pines – made “everlasting” by an enzyme which stops them rotting away. Lianas and giant “man ferns” wrap themselves, Tolkien-like round the windows. But inside the Aussie wit is more down to earth. “Anyone want the toilet?” the guard announces. “Then use the nearest tree at the next stop” And Dubbil Barrell really is the name of the station where we pause for lunch on the platform, while a little diesel couple couples up for the journey downhill to Strahan.
From here, I am to take the steamer along the tannin-stained waters of the mighty Franklin river into the heart of the World Heritage Area forest. But tonight, with a gale jangling the rigging of the fishing boats in the little harbour, I am tucked into a restaurant having dinner with the genial general manager of the railway. Eamonn Seddon, who once ran the Ffestiniog Railway in north Wales, is a British export, too. We “yarn” about Tassie, about narrow-gauge railways and about The Ghan, the legendary overland train on which I have just travelled across the mainland to get here. The Ghan is indisputably one of the great train journeys of the world. But so, in its own way, we agree, is the magical little train in the forest.
Michael Williams travelled with Tailor Made Travel, who offer a 12-day “Best of Tasmania” self-drive, staying in boutique hotels for £1,875 per person, including flights from London (www-tailor-made.co.uk). Great Rail Journeys offer all-inclusive trips on The Ghan at prices from £4,495, including travel from the UK (www.greatrail.com).
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