Mountain route
West Coast Wilderness Railway
Queenstown → Strahan · Australia
West Coast Wilderness Railway in pictures


Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 35 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 4 h
- Average speed
- 9 km/h
- Top speed
- 20 km/h
- Operator
- West Coast Wilderness Railway
- Train
- Abt rack steam locomotives
- Countries
- Australia
- In service since
- 1896
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
The 1896 copper railway hauls itself up 1-in-16 grades on Abt rack cogs, steaming once more from Queenstown’s bare hills into the King River rainforest.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 11127635 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 4 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: West Coast Wilderness Railway — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
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