Railways.

Flushed with tremendous wealth generated by the goldfields, the Victorian government invested over £9 million in the decade between 1854 and 1864 to build just 254 miles of railway, while private companies invested another £1.8 million.

The Victorian Railways Department was established in 1856, and the rail network rapidly began to radiate out from Melbourne. The first major country lines were to Echuca and Geelong to capitalise on freight traffic.

By 1870, construction of the lines to Ballarat, Sandhurst (Bendigo), and Echuca had been completed. While in the city, the suburban lines to the south and east were still privately owned, although the separate companies had amalgamated into one.

The tramways opened in 1884 which also rapidly spread across Melbourne’s inner suburbs.

Following hard on the heels of legislation to alienate and settle rural Victoria, two Acts of Parliament were passed in December 1880, and December 1884, which authorised the construction of 89 new railway lines, more than doubling Victoria’s network to over 2,900 miles by 1892. It included provisions to direct £200,000 per annum from the sale of public forests to fund the railway borrowings.

The legislation became notoriously known as the “Octopus Acts” in reference to the tentacle like web of tracks it created.

But the period was also characterised by blatant political interference in railway planning, with some parliamentarians shamelessly lobbying to have railways built through their own electorates, or even to serve land developments in which they had a direct financial interest.

The most famous example of political meddling was by the State Premier, Sir Thomas Bent, who was also the Treasurer and Minister for Railways. He had significant landholdings near Brighton and unashamedly approved a tramline from St Kilda, which led right past his properties to the new suburb of Bentleigh which he then pompously named in his own honour.

And it wasn’t just politicians, there are many stories of railway surveyors and engineers being lavishly entertained at country pubs and accommodation houses by local businessmen seeking to secure a more favourable alignment. Just think how many Railway Hotels there are across rural Victoria.

The period between 1880 and 1890 was then marked by a frenzy of railway construction as branch lines were constructed to serve new agricultural communities and to support suburban land speculation.

This network required nearly five million wooden sleepers, mostly from durable timbers like red gum sourced from the Murray River, ironbark near Bendigo and yellow stringybark and grey box from Gippsland.

In Victoria, sleepers typically measured 9 inches wide by 4.5 inches thick and 9 feet long, which roughly equated to a volume of 30 superficial feet.

During the 1880s, the annual demand for sleepers, just for maintenance and upgrades, was over 46,000, but in the subsequent decade the demand skyrocketed. In 1898 it passed 200,000, with 610,000 used for all purposes.

Thousands of sleeper cutters were employed and only the best quality timbers were acceptable to the Railways Department. They  also preferred sleepers hewn by hand with a broad axe and adze rather than sawn. This was a very wasteful practice, with one or two sleepers cut from a tree with the remainder left to rot.

The newly appointed Conservator of Forests, George Perrin, was at constant loggerheads with the Railways Department over the wasteful cutting of sleepers.  He unsuccessfully urged that sleeper hewers should be excluded from the forest and made clear his belief that they bore the bulk of responsibility for the destruction of Victoria’s valuable forest timber resources.

In addition to the provision of millions of sleepers, timber bridges also demonstrated the fundamental significance that State forests played in the rapid development of the new colony of Victoria.

From the early 1870s, the Victorian Railways maintained a policy of building all new bridges from timber to reduce costs, except in special circumstances which required the use of more permanent materials like brick, steel and concrete.

Although cheaper to construct, the timber bridges required more frequent and expensive on-going maintenance. Most of the key elements such as sleepers, girders, cross beams, piles etc would have been progressively replaced with locally sourced hardwoods.

Over 2000 wooden bridges were built on the railway network but most of these lines are now closed following the advent of better roads and vehicles.

The bridges then fell victim to decay, neglect, floods and bushfires, but a few operational bridges remain, mostly on heritage railways like Puffing Billy and Maldon.

The railways developed in conjunction with postal and telegraph services to provide communications for regional communities.