Eastern Goldfields Railway

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Eastern Goldfields Railway (EGR) was built in the 1880s to connect Perth, Western Australia with the rich goldfields at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The narrow gauge Eastern Railway line already connected Perth with Northam, and the EGR extended this line through semi-desert to the goldfields. The railway line was soon running parallel with the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme.

In 1917, the EGR linked up at Kalgoorlie with the Trans-Australian Railway from Port Augusta, but with an inconvenient break-of-gauge.

The chief engineer for both the railway and the pipeline was C. Y. O'Connor.

Operationally the EGR was the main route to connect with the Leonora and Esperance branch lines.

In 1968, the EGR was converted to standard gauge, on a substantially different route, mostly to the north of the original route, which included access to Koolyanobbing where an iron ore mine operated and which used the rail access to transport ore to the coast.

[edit] Upgrades

In November 2005, funding was announced for various upgrades of the EGR ^[1]. These included:

$33.1 million to replace the final 76 km of timber sleepers between Koolyanobbing and Kalgoorlie with concrete sleepers.
$12 million to extend eight crossing loops to accommodate 1800m long trains. The crossing loops are at Bodallin, Darrine, Wallaroo, Lake Julia, Grass Valley, Bungulla, Booraan and Seabrook.