North Mount Lyell Copper Co 4-6-0 Locomotives in Australia

Class unknown (Locobase 10257)

Data from "6-coupled Narrow Gauge Locomotive for the North Mount Lyell Copper Co., Tasmania", The Locomotive Magazine,Vol VIII (17 Jan 1903), p.41. See also Wikipedia and [], the Australian Government's history of transportation.

According to the above account, this design is a scaled-down version of David Jones's 6-coupled bogie freight engines used on the Highland Railway. Its antipodean destination was the largest copper mining company on the West Coast of Tasmania and a railway that is derided by the Australian government history as follows: "For extravagance, uselessness and lack of longevity, though, the North Mount Lyell Mining Company's railway was in a class of its own." But the Belpaire-boilered Ten-wheelers endured.

Mount Lyell (thc company, but the brooding mountain as well) dominated Queenstown, Strahan and Gormanston until its closure in 1994.

The production figures are impressive: more than a million tonnes of copper, 750 tonnes of silver and 45 tonnes of gold -- equivalent, says Wikipedia, "... to over 4 billion dollars worth of metal in 1995 terms." Also impressive was the devastation wrought on the watersheds by the tailings, about 100 million tonnes of which were dumped into the Queen River. This was remediated in 1994-1996.