I had a difficult time finding wireless in Australia and even more in New Zealand. I found a place that has wireless but won’t let me use FTP to upload photos. I am sorry some of the photos in recent posts were not working, but without FTP it is hard to diagnose the problem.
In any case, Hugh Jardonn was nice enough to ask me to post some photos of my trip to the Zig Zag Railway, so I am doing so using Flickr. The trip was pretty inspirational if you are a railfan, as a small group of people have done a wonderful job restoring dozens of pieces of historic rail equipment along with (so far) more than 7 kilometers of track.
In the late 1960s, most Australian states had converted steam locomotives to Diesel and electrics, and some railfans in New South Wales decided to restore some steam locomotives and operate them for tourists. They looked at a couple of dozen possible locations and picked the Zig Zag, a place in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where the rails once switched back and forth to gain elevation.
Before 1910, trains from Sydney would cross this “number one” stone viaduct going down a 2.5% grade, then stop just beyond the cut in the right center of the photo. Then they would back down the numbers two and three stone viaducts seen in the center of the photo, then reverse again and continue on to Lithgow on the line barely visible on the right. Today, the bottom line is still the mainline of the railway, while the top two lines are used by the tourist railway.
