Timber tramwayIt was one of the engineering feats of early Australia when it was built in the 1920s. But all that remains of Lars Andersen’s remarkable wooden tramway on Pinecliffe Mountain, 14 kilometres west of Esk in south-east Queensland, are a few sections of runnelled timber rails, the occasional rusty roller, and a haphazard strand of telegraph wire that once ran taut beside the tramway and through the majestic stands of timber.
These artefacts lie scattered and almost invisible on a mountainside resplendent with natural stands of hoop (Araucaria cuninghamii) and bunya (Araucaria bidwillii) pine. In its heyday, the tramway was testament to the glory days of timber felling and the "can do" attitude of our country’s pioneers. As it lies now, it is a sobering reminder of the passage of time and the unstoppable regenerative powers of the forest. Lars Andersen was born in Denmark and, in 1880 at age 20, arrived in Brisbane with brothers Jason and Hans. He is remembered as a successful timber businessman with extraordinary mechanical abilities – the builder of some of the largest sawmills in the Brisbane Valley in the early 1900s and one of its largest employers as townships developed in the region. But it was his innovative solutions to the problems of removing large quantities of timber from mountainous forests (conventionally done, with some difficulty, by sliding logs down earth chutes) through a remarkable system of tramways and flying foxes, which capture the imagination of today’s timber industry historians. Andersen built three "winder" tramways: one in the Bunya Mountains, one near Somerset Dam, and one down a steep eastern slope of Pinecliffe Mountain. The tramways were as simple in operation as they were ingenious in design. Save for spikes and rollers, they were constructed entirely of the timber available on site, and were powered by gravity alone. Three wooden rails, with a gauge of three feet, were spiked to sleepers laid two feet and six inches apart. On these ran two trolleys, which shared the middle rail. Timber, mainly hoop pine, was loaded and wound down the slope (hence "winder").
The trolley heading down pulled an empty trolley back up the slope and, for a small distance in the middle of the tramway, the rails divided to allow the trolleys to pass. A telegraph wire ran the distance beside the rails, and was used to signal those below of the impending departure of a load of timber from above. The Pinecliffe tramway, the most celebrated of the three, was opened on 26 August 1922 by Esk shire councillor Alex Smith, in front of some 300 locals who made a lengthy pilgrimage to the site by horse and buggy through dense scrub. Building the tramway was a colossal undertaking. It appears no one recorded how many people worked on its construction, but it is known that, for the winder system and rails and sleepers, about 50,000 super feet of timber (just over 1400 cubic metres, or enough to build 100 average-sized homes) were used. The tramway carried its last load of timber in 1942, 16 years after Andersen sold the operation to James Campbell, of Brisbane, and just a year after his death. The timber it carried supplied a mill Andersen built on Cressbrook Creek, east of Pinecliffe Mountain. Running down the eastern slope, the tramway was 800 metres in length and travelled a "1 in 2" incline. A second, horse-drawn tramway continued for about a mile over flat ground to move the logs to the Cressbrook mill. Lars Andersen’s remarkable transport systems feature in old photographs and films, but, although well known to forest historians, they have yet to become known in the general community. Acknowledgements: Facts and figures quoted in this article have been sourced from Joe’s Book: Facts and theories on the Bunya Mountains, first published in 1978 by the Bunya Mountains National History Association, and A History of the Shire of Esk published in 1988 by the then Esk Shire Council (now the Somerset Regional Council).
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