199308Ulantunnel3Up0003

Thanks George. This line provides a route from western NSW to port at Newcastle which doesn't involve the Blue Mountains line and suburban Sydney. Mary Vale is/was on the line between Orange and Dubbo. Most traffic is coal from mines in the Ulan area, which is the reason it was built after 50 years pause. Gulgong is on the line which went north west through Coonabarabran which intersects with the Dubbo - Werris Creek line which allows mineral and grain from west of Dubbo to get to Newcastle.

Thanks Gudrun. They wouldn't want to be in the tunnel when a train came through. The tunnel has poor ventilation and each driver or other train operating person is issued with an emergency breathing aid in case of a breakdown in the tunnel.

One of the project's huts was at the far end of this tunnel. I observed that it could take 15 minutes before I could see the light from this end of the tunnel after a train had been through. This situation meant we had to do a lot of organising when we had to put a project team person on a train on this line rather than I or another just getting on a loco of a passing train or one of the project's test trains when we needed to follow up on a driver's observation or investigate a problem the project team had found..

That sounds like an awful lot of problems, a good thing you were not cutting any edges and were careful.

Interesting pov