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All Aboard Trains Of Australia By Patsy Smith Hard Cover
All Aboard Trains Of Australia By Patsy Smith Hard Cover 40 Pages
The thrill and excitement associated with the steam locomotive sparked people's imagination more than any other contraption invented. 'The Railways' quickly caught on in Australia and alore soon grew up around the engines and the men who drove them. The spread of railways across the country helped to blaze a trail and tame the outback, to open up the continent.
When George Stephenson's steam engine ran from Liverpool to Manchester on 15 September 1830, Victoria, the first colony in Australia to send a steam train along a railway line, had not yet been settled by Europeans. Before the building of railways began in Australia every State had its no man's land to cross. Construction and new settlements followed, along with social, economic and industrial life. There had scarcely been time to develop a horse-and-buggy age before the railway engine arrived.
hi the days when locomotives first crossed the land, Australians began an affair with the 'iron horse' that exists to this day. The romantics still speak of engines as though they are living, breathing things.
The first railway in Australia, though, could not have been less romantic. The 1836 convict line fitted the definition of a railway as -a conveyance for passengers and freight, drawn along fixed parallel rails ... under statutory authority except for its unorthodox -motive power. It was hauled by men from the prison settlement at Port Arthur in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). The line ran for seven kilometres across Tasman Peninsula, an idea of the prison commandant, Captain O'Hara Booth, to save travellers from Hobart the rough sea voyage across Storm Bay and around Tasman Island to the penal port.
Convicts first constructed the earth works, then propelled the 'carts'. Captain Stonor wrote from a passenger's perspective: The many ascents and descents form a very amusing transit, for as you rise the incline the prisoners puff and blow pushing the carriage but when descending ... away you go, dashing, crashing, tearing on ... a quite nervous affair. On one section the train reached forty miles an hour (64 kph) ... it requires some little nerve to keep one's composure ... the least obstruction would send carriages and their contents to immortal smash.
Horses that had been bred for more than 50 years to haul rail trains were still being used after the turn of the century.
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