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Up Whitton’s Way

from The Indian-Pacific

written by Jim Downes

Sometimes, the railway across the Blue Mountains is called ‘Whitton’s Way,’ an unofficial tribute to the Engineer, John Whitton, who is credited with its construction.

It was Whitton who sent railway surveyors along the cattle track, later a road, that had been blazed across the barrier hills in 1813 by an expedition led by three gentlemen of the colony, Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson. History credits the three with the discovery of a way over the mountains, and railway stations are named in their honour. But some of today’s historians are inclined to think the honour belongs elsewhere, perhaps even to a convict named Wilson who was in no position to dispute the social pressures of the time that decided where honours should be bestowed.

That first track succeeded because the explorers, or explorer, sought a track along the top of the complex of ridges that comprise the Dividing Range west of Sydney. Others failed because they had followed valleys which brought them to dead ends. The track over the mountains, once established, became the trade route to the inland, and convict labour made of it a road fit for the coaches of Cobb & Co., the Australian transport legend only the railways would destroy.

The railwaymen followed the ridges, too, but their task was infinitely more difficult for they had to find a route whose grades and curves were within the capacities of small steam locomotives and the adhesion of their wheels on rails.

‘It can’t be done’ was a catch cry of the times. A Parson, J D Lang, proposed that trains should stop when the going became too steep, and passengers could walk up stairways, and goods be lifted by rope, to another train higher up. Lang’s Stairway to Heaven barely got past his pulpit, but an equally ratbag idea caused engineer Whitton some serious problems, because this was the pet plan of His Excellency the Colonial Governor.

The Governor, Denison, was a military man – Colonial Governorship was a way of rewarding military careers while at the same time keeping old soldiers out of British politics – and he was fond of horses. He wanted a horse-drawn tram across the Blue Mountains.

The Engineer, Whitton, usually described as a ‘Bluff Yorkshireman,’ was a man of uncompromising standards. Almost as old as railways themselves, he’d begun his apprenticeship only five years after the great locomotive trials at Rainhill, where, in 1825, Stephenson’s steam engine, The Rocket, showed the way of future transport.

Whitton saw his job in New South Wales as the building of a standard gauge railway system, steam powered, and equal to the best of British practice. He would accept no less. Certainly, he would have no part of horses and trams. Showing foresight not always apparent in later railway developments, the Powers That Were agreed that Whitton’s Way was best. Not that it would be made easy for him: The money allocated for railways was trimmed and pared and halved and eventually quartered. Whitton steepened his grades, tightened his curves, milled his own timber, cut his own stone and pushed his railway, a real railway, over the mountains.

His international reputation in engineering was made by his solution to a sheer ascent on the coastal side of the range and an even more savage descent on the inland side. Whitton designed two switchbacks (zigzags, to the excited local press) and had incorporated in them a series of elegant sandstone viaducts which stand to this day as a monument more telling than the bronze bust at Sydney Central Station.And as the ultimate monument to a railwayman, some of his great stone viaducts still regularly carry trains. The main lines have long since bypassed the switchbacks by a series of ten tunnels (called the Rat Holes by steam engine men who found them a preparation for hell) but a tourist line called the Zig Zag Railway ensures that the sights and sounds of steam live still along Whitton’s Way. Ironically, the Zig Zag is a narrow gauge (3’6") line, for good practical and economic reasons.Settlement of the Blue Mountains inevitably followed the railway. An Australian tradition measures the size of a town by its number of ‘pubs’ (hotels), and one-pub villages grew along the coach routes of Cobb and Co.

Cobb worked on a forty-mile day: After forty miles in a coach, passengers were more than ready for a night in an unmoving bed. So came the coaching inns, and around them the villages which were there and waiting when the railways came. In between the overnight stages, perhaps ten miles apart, were meal stops and stables where horses and drivers changed and passengers ate and drank.

And again, villages grew and some of them were lucky enough to be along the railway, and they prospered.

Nowadays, a chain of Blue Mountains townships, Glenbrook, Valley Heights, Springwood, Faulconbridge, Hazelbrook and the rest all the way to the top of the range west of Mount Victoria, are extensions of Sydney’s residential area. They had their beginnings as weekend and holiday destinations for city people, prosperous people, who could afford the escape from the summer heat and humidity of the coastal plain, and on both sides of the railway grand houses, evidence of times past, hide behind trees and hedges.

Commuter trains carry mountain residents to and from jobs in the city, and at weekends the Blue Mountains gain an extra population of tourists, drawn by the climate and the spectacular scenery which have brought people since the railway first made travel possible for anyone who sought it.

The economies forced on John Whitton as he built his way over the mountains have never been fully eased and, though the route is electrified now, the tunnels widened and the track doubled all the way to Lithgow, the Blue Mountains railway still has the sharpest curves and steepest grades anywhere between Sydney and Perth. It’s the sharpness of the curves that limit the speed of the Indian Pacific through the mountains. Trackside signs tell drivers the maximum speeds allowed on each section, and train controllers right along the way from Sydney to Perth and back have the east and westbound trains slotted into elaborate traffic plans.

The passenger trains have their places in an intricate pattern of time and movement that will take them across the continent with minimum delays and few stops, and arrivals on time almost four and a half thousand kilometres later.

West of the Blue Mountains, the double track main line is reduced to single track almost all the way to Perth. This demands an exact choreography of rolling masses weighing perhaps six thousand tonnes and moving in opposite directions at a hundred and ten kilometres an hour and more. Passing loops make it possible, and because this is primarily a working railway and freight trains are its profit-makers, the freighters have right of way. That is why the Indian-Pacific will stop sometimes in the middle of nowhere, for no reason apparent until a coast to coast super-freighter howls past at the full power of two, three or four locomotives. The speed of the things, their relative silence until a short distance away, and their absolute unstoppability in less than a couple of kilometres, are the reasons the Indian-Pacific’s doors remain resolutely locked at these passing loops. Some passengers complain it’s officialdom being unnecessarily officious. The railways know that passengers sometimes do silly things, and that wandering about night or day around a passing loop is likely to damage the wanderer more than the train that runs him over. So the doors stay shut and locked, except for station stops along the way.