If you look at the map, you'll see a rough black circle - that's the railway line, which is configured as a spiral. According to a book by Tim Fischer that I just read, it enables trains to rise some 200 metres in less than a kilometre, which is pretty steep going for a train. Trains normally like a rise of something like 1 in 100, not 1 in 5. I think there are only two spirals in Australia. The other is up near the Qld border somewhere.
The crap thing about the spiral from ground level is that it doesn't look like much. This is the best photo that I could get of it, and it just looks like a normal tunnel. Well, it isn't. There is a dirty great big cutting just beyond this gate. If you kept on driving, you'd drop straight off the edge and fall at least 20 metres to the track.
Driving up to view the spiral requires a 4WD, since the road is completely washed away and cut up quite badly. You need a 4WD more for the clearance - I doubt a silly little Subaru 4WD would make it over some of the sump removing rocks.
This photo shows one of the better stretches of track. Note all the busted up rock on the right of the photo - I presume that is what was blasted out of the cuttings and tunnels.
The road to the spiral is not marked - we were just tooling down the highway when I noticed a likely looking track, so we peeled off and followed it and got lucky.
It breaks the monotony of a 6 hour drive.
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