Qualla: Puffing Billy Railway

Puffing Billy Railway: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick carson at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. There is one rule on the Puffing Billy that everyone breaks, because they are meant to. You sit on the wooden sill of an open-sided carriage and let your legs swing out over the edge of the moving train, the way Australian children have done for a hundred years. The little steam engine hauls you up through the tree-fern gullies and towering mountain ash of the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, whistle echoing off the green, and crosses a curving timber trestle bridge high above Monbulk Creek. The railway was built in 1900 to carry timber and orchard fruit out of the hills. It never once turned a profit, was shut for dead in the 1950s, and survives today only because thousands of volunteers refused to let it die. It is now one of the most beloved steam railways in the world.

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Image: Nick carson at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Puffing Billy Railway: A Line for Timber and Apples

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Puffing Billy was one of five narrow-gauge lines the Victorian Railways built around the turn of the twentieth century, laid to a slender two-foot-six gauge to twist cheaply through difficult country. Opened in 1900, it branched off the main network at Upper Ferntree Gully and wo...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Puffing Billy Railway: Closed for Dead

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. The railway never made money, not in a single year of its working life, and the Victorian Railways watched it dwindle. After the Second World War, services thinned to a single train a week and a road bus. Then, in 1953, a landslide buried the line between Selby and Menzies Creek,...

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Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

Puffing Billy Railway: The Volunteers Who Would Not Let Go

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Effluvium1, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 1 October 1955, Harold Hewett and a group of enthusiasts formed the Puffing Billy Preservation Society, determined to keep the trains running indefinitely. They ran services to Belgrave until 1958, then set about rebuilding the line piece by piece. In a wonderful chapter, Rove...

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Image: Effluvium1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Puffing Billy Railway: Reckoning With a Darker History

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The railway's modern story includes a hard truth that it has chosen to confront rather than bury. A long-serving senior volunteer, Robert Whitehead, was found to have committed decades of child sexual abuse connected to the railway and other heritage organisations, and a 2018 rep...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Puffing Billy Railway: Steam in the Mountain Ash

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The railway owns every surviving Victorian Railways narrow-gauge locomotive, and has restored almost all of them to steam, among them the trim little 2-6-2 NA-class engines and the powerful articulated Garratts that can haul up to eighteen carriages where the smaller engines mana...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Michael johnson assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0