With the easing of the lockdown, I was able to resume by midweek bush;ks wiht Bob. We headed up the mountains with several trips in mind, but the weather looked bad higher up – rain, so we thought it wise to stop at Glenbrook and walk there. Bob hadn’t done the walk around the Lapstone Monocline that I had been on the year before and was happy to repeat it. In the conditions it turned out to be a good walk.
Bob parked near the Visitor Information centre, and we soon crossed the highway and walk around the oval.
We were soon in the bush and on our way to the historic Lennox Bridge.
We then followed the track up to the first of two lookouts – Marges Lookout.
And then more filtered views from Elizabeth Lookout –
We stayed on the track, down a lot of stairs to reach the old Knapsack Railway Viaduct.
This is a very impressive stone structure. The brideg was originally built for a single railway line. It was later widened with “corbells” being added to accomodate the line duplicaton. When the railway line was deviated, the bridge was used for the Great Western Highway
We then climbed up some more stairs on the souther side to reach a higher part of the old zig zag. This was close to the old Lucasville Station.
This station provided convenient access to the holiday house of a politician. Here is one of the zig zags –
We took the down section. Here you can see an old pipe – this provided water to the original Lapstone Hotel.
We then reached the highway. We took the underpass towards the hamlet of Lapstone. A little way along, at the Lazy Frog, we turned off to the right and followed the railway cutting of the first deviation. This led to the portal on a tunnel.
This tunnel proved too difficult for steam locomotives, so a second deviation was undertaken troth Glenbrook Gorge. For the construction of this a tramway was built with a funicular railway at the end. Here is a cutting on the tramway route –
At th terminus, we went to a nearby lookout for the great views of Glenbrook Gorge. Here you can see the second deviation.
It had been lightly raining most of he day, so we headed to a shelter shed at the main lookout for lunch. Then it was a short walk back to Bob’s car via the streets of Glenbrook.