A nice lazy start today as we had nothing in particular planned. The forecast was for rain (much needed around here) later in the day, so we decided to head off walking down the Ocean Beach Trail. This is just to the west of the town and is around a 2km track down to the beach, but what a beach – once again superlatives fail me …..
One of the things we had planned in Strahan was a trip on the West Coast Wilderness Railway. This runs from Strahan to Queenstown through the rainforest and was originally constructed for the Mount Lyell Mining Company – well what else would it have been for round here! The railway was the only way to get the ore to market from the mines in Queenstown. Originally it ran to Teepookana where the ore was transferred into barges and floated down to the port in Strahan, but eventually they made the barges redundant by extending the railway to Regatta Point in Strahan. This made Strahan one of the most important ports in Australia for while, but eventually as the mining became more uneconomic, so too did the railway and it finally stopped running in 1963.
It was thanks to a very committed group of locals in the 1990s that the Federal Government gave them $20m to restore the track as a tourist attraction and also as a vehicle (excuse the pun!) for highlighting the local mining history for visitors. They still use many of the original locomotives and one of the key features of the track is a rack and pinion system (similar to the one used on the Mount Snowdon railway) to enable them to negotiate the steep inclines through the rainforest to Queenstown. Our plans to go on it were somewhat stymied by the fact that there is currently extensive maintenance work taking place, but we made do with a coffee and snack in the station café.