The Abandoned Mundijong-Jarrahdale Railway

[Music] thank you [Music] exercise hello filming the intro in the studio today because I'm a big dum-dum long story short I filmed all of today's video with the my rode microphone plugged into the headphone jack of the camera as opposed to the microphone Jack and even though I'm usually pretty good at staying on top of you know listing back on Clips as I film them obviously you know where this story is going I didn't check until right at the end and I started looking through the clips and realized there was no audio coming out of the camera at all I thought that's strange I have seen waveforms as I've been filming of course I wasn't getting any audio out of the camera because like I said the microphone was plugged into the headphone jack so pulling that out and I realized the entire video had been filmed using the internal microphone of the camera so it could be worse the only clip that's a complete write-off is the intro on the car with me hence why I'm filming this today just the noise of the car it's just too much luckily the rest of it isn't too bad the microphone built into the camera did a pretty decent job considering I turned off most of the enhanced settings so they don't muck around with my microphone at all there is a few bits where the wind gets a little bit too much so I'm just going to throw subtitles in so it is what it is what it is I thought I'd I thought the whole video was going to be a write-off so I was fortunate that a lot of the footage is salvageable so anyway on to the intro itself what was I doing in that car where was I driving well to answer that question well the answer is Munda Jong which is about an hour south of Perth the reason I was going to Munda Jong is because that's where there is the start of a abandoned Railway line and that runs all the way to the back blocks of jaredale now this is interesting because there's not many like abandoned intact Railways in the Perth metro area as far as I can tell this might be the only one hopefully I'm wrong about that but it's been it's they've opened it in the late 60s and I ran and up until the late 90s and yeah like I said usually when a track finishes service they rip it up straight away but for some reason this one's still there so let's cut to the back blocks of London and we'll be making our way from Munda Jong all the way to Jared out which is basically becoming a second home for the videos at this point all right so here we are at the start I don't want to go any further than this because that is a live train line and it is illegal to walk on those for good reasons I believe that's the line that goes to Bunbury which is featured in a previous video but as we can see here the the lines have been removed and separated from the existing line and here Begins the journey to jaredale it's in pretty good condition considering it hasn't been used for 25 odd years and there's actually on this section at least there's not too much Shrubbery growing out so if you remember the train line from the oil Brook episode the trees growing out of that were basically mature and that Railway line has been closed about 15 to 20 years longer than this one so give another couple of decades and they might be full-size trees so a bit further down the track just a couple of dozen meters we are at the right Street crossing which has been completely removed and I'm actually forgot to check when this was removed so I'll do some investigating when I get home but I do know that it predates any sort of um street view captures so at least prior to the 2008 2009 but as we can see here it's been completely paved over not only by just by this footpath but of course the road itself and we could just see the uh the ghostly remains obviously I won't be walking the whole train line the train line is 18 kilometers long in total and I've just picked out some key points to check out along the way so we'll just walk down this train line just a little bit we can see there is the remains of infrastructure utility boxes stuff like that and obviously that's looking quite far-grown whatever it was some sort of power box uh like I said just about everything's still here the railway line is in pretty good condition otherwise so we'll hop back in the car and we'll go check out the next Crossing all right so we're a little bit out of London jumping out sort of in the suburbs and I just wanted to check out this particular Railway Crossing because it's very old doesn't have any any sort of barriers or anything like that I think evil died by some local residents so I'm going to stick around here too long it looks like this Crossing was just for this property which is some sort of farm check that out but obviously pretty good for the residents I haven't had to put up with the noise of freight trains or anything like that for a quite a long time that's just where we came from and the local dogs are going off so I'm gonna get out of here okay so that's where we came from where the dog was and we've come to another disused Crossing it's quite a busy road I'm pretty surprised actually I'm sure I'm getting some weird looks from the locals but here they've at least somewhat kept the tracks but they've built a barrier right over the road right over the railway line I have to be careful I did see a dead snake as well we can see there there's some old infrastructure there in the bushes I can keep saying it's amazing that it's all still here all these years later so here we are on the other side of the guard rail barrier and get a better look at some of the cool Old Railway stuff that's still around so I've got an old Culvert or something in there in this portion of the train line looks mint I reckon they could run a train on this tomorrow if they wanted to it's amazing that it's just been sitting here so long abandoned we'll get into the history soon just wanted to get into a few more secluded places away from snakes dogs and Automobiles basically so yeah because an interesting environment nonetheless so let's hop back in the car and see what else we can find so here is probably the coolest aspect of the whole thing for a bridge up there and I'll show you the rest of that bridge so here's the missing Bridge that I believe was removed sometime in 2016. not entirely sure you see it's pretty big I've just put it on the railway Reserve here we're just across the road from the uh the Shire buildings there see if I can get you a shot up there but hopefully that was interesting because I'm not entirely sure what I was looking at as we can see here it looks like it's probably been hit by a truck or something at some point as we can see from the remains of the bridge it would have been a pretty low clearance and yeah not really that much to see but interesting nonetheless there's even weeds growing out of it all right apologies I had forgot to put the windsock on the microphone so hopefully the previous footage isn't too windy and you can understand what I'm saying I won't really know and until I get back home anyway this uh this bridge like I said was removed sometime around 2016 and as we saw from the previous shop uh shots in mundo Jong that's been removed so like I was just saying the track is an almost Mint Condition let me just give you a quick shot in the other direction like the railway line is in remarkable condition it's amazing that they haven't shot or used it for some sort of like tourist Railway or something like that but then of course you see that this entire bridge is missing so yeah that's uh that's going to be a problem if you want to run a train here again I don't think I'm really going to bother walking to the other side but it's pretty much just what we have on this side obviously it's inaccessible I'm going to stay on this Nissan butt yeah as we can see there the train lines just stop but of course only temporarily let's head to our next stop this is extremely Steep and I'm filming just in case I fall over because it'll be funny probably one thing it's funny now but definitely real while I'm editing it was just going to say I've got Dimension walls up at the top but this bridge is what spurred me on to investigate this entire line to begin with because I've driven along this road quite a lot for work and yeah just go through that through the old arches here of the old bridge and you just have to wander yourself where do those go so more or less I'm a bit out of breath now that's what this whole video is about all right we've traveled a considerable distance from the last shot there are a few places I was thinking of stopping along the way but we're sort of running out of daylight here so but I think most of the places I was planning on going pretty much look like this but as we can see the railway line is in a much poorer condition here it's like the bank is breaking and it's like separating the railway lines I don't know I've never really seen anything like this before so interestingly the railway line here is just completely disappeared I did set up a waypoint to come down here and check it out and I couldn't quite remember the reason as I was driving but I guess it's the reason why I see how the ends there are a painted yellow it looks like they've deliberately removed this portion of the track I'm not exactly sure why but that's it's interesting nonetheless I guess okay now that we have some piecing quiet and we're away from other people basically I guess I can start reading off some facts so what was the point of this Railway line well it was for a bauxite mine owned by Alcoa so the mine opened in 1963 and then closed in 1998. over the 35 years of service it supplied 168 million tons of bauxite I don't really have too much information otherwise apparently it connected to a quinana Spur Line so I could transport the bauxite directly to the refineries there um what else do I have Arc infrastructure refers to it as jaradale number two brackets 18. apparently 18 stands for 18 kilometers long otherwise it's part of the wagr lines that's Western Australian government railways um the original line did run to a Timber Mill as per my previous videos shot in uh jaredale there's something crawling on my arm um but that was closed in 1962. um The Strain line did close in the late 90s but you can actually see one of the trains in operation in a 1995 capture so that's that's pretty cool the final train ran on the line in 1999 and then a special one-time passenger tourist service run by Hoffman Valley ran in 1999. supposedly the mine site was rehabbed in the May of 2001 but this is Alcoa we're talking about and as we'll soon find out they have been in a bit of trouble with how well they have perceived to rehabilitate the land they they've used for mining and whatnot so basically we're going to follow this line to its end points which will be the next stop and we'll see for ourselves how well the bush has been rehabbed okay so here we are at the end of our car road which is kind of a cool abandoned Road in its own right but as we can see the uh the bitumen ends so the Kia can't go any further and now we walk so believe it or not this is the railway line so somewhere in the bush in between where we just were in here the train lines just stop but obviously the alignment's still here I believe this area is now a uh I don't know like a Leisure area there were people on dirt bikes and stuff when we got here so yeah we're gonna follow this and sort of see where it goes and see if we can find any remains of the former Borg site mine or remains of anything really so a bit further down the track all the ballasts has reappeared it's kind of random how some of the train line is here in some spots and not in others I'm sure that was a good reason for it but this of course is now looking like a rail line was here we're in a cutting at the moment hopefully this isn't too difficult to walk on so just an update nothing too interesting but I do think the uh The Rock cuttings here are fairly interesting in their own right and I haven't really seen much in the way of abandoned Railway stuff actually there might be some stuff up ahead actually but um yeah I've just seen like Railway tires bits of wood obviously a lot of ballasts which is super fun to walk on let's see what this stuff is up ahead so not entirely sure what that's supposed to be and here we have information about this Railway cutting which is on the Heritage list or on the register or something like that and I couldn't quite figure out why I wasn't expecting these signs to be here so we'll go on a bit further through a different Railway cutting I've been meaning to walk to and I'll I'll give you a little bit more information about these rocks you guys ready for a geology lesson I hope so plenty of jokes about things rocking I don't know I'll shut up now let's move forward so out of that big Railway cutting now it's sort of just in the behind the trees there and this is becoming to look less and less like there was a train line here further in we get they are well just more that the bush has taken over so it looks like all of this has probably been burnt recently controlled burnout imagine so it's actually not that thick but I can imagine it would have been quite thick before this recent burn anyway I think there's another Railway cutting through there somewhere so we'll keep going for a bit and sort of see where we end up all right we finally made it to the Waypoint on my GPS looks like a few other cars made it here too and then never left we've been more or less just been walking through the bush following a track obviously all of it's all grown over I'm not sure if it's like deliberate or not look at these rocks okay so I found what was called the jaredale railway cutting on the inherit website which was nominated for a geological monument in 1991 and the railway line was still running then so I incorrectly thought it was this because I spotted this on on maps but I think it was that area where before with the sign boards so anyway why is a railway cutting Heritage listed there's plenty of Railway cuttings in Australia and it was the first one that I've seen so basically it was nominated by the chief executive of National Trust in 1991 and they included on the register because apparently it was a research site of national and international importance with our bauxite laterite and laterite development the area is of a scientific importance in reconstructing past Australian climates and probably going to say this word wrong geomorphology so apparently it's an important teaching site for tutorial for you know students in the Perth area and apparently it's regularly used for this purpose so there you go things of notes evidence of past climates stuff like that so this isn't actually the area for that but I'm sure this is cool regardless hopefully the sort of person who comes here and dumps cars doesn't Rock up so there's a railway cutting down there and what we're looking at now is more or less the remains of the site of the mine site so for some reason there's heaps of stock photos of this side of this mine I'm not entirely sure why but as we can see on the ground it's all bush it looks pretty good to me but obviously I'm not in the know for these sort of things are the wa's department of biodiversity conservation and attractions claims akoa hasn't actually met their rehab criteria for any of the nearly 28 000 hectares they've mined across wa four thousand of those are here so I think it looks pretty good it looks like Bushland to me it's crazy when you look at photos aerial photos of what the place used to look like but apparently they haven't done a good enough job so I think the deal was if they did a good enough job the taxpayers would basically put the bill which I don't agree with at all but apparently they haven't met the criteria so apparently they've got to pay for it so basically Alcoa sucks so I'm a massive genius and I've just realized I've filmed this entire video with the microphone plugged into the headphone jack not into the microphone Jack so there appears to be audio but I apologize massively in advance if it's really obviously it's not using the the wind thing or anything like that so pretty disappointing to figure that out right at the end of the video but I guess I'll just have to move on so regardless that is the end of the video we've followed the train line all the way from Monday Jong to here in the middle of the bush the railway the railway line is in very good condition closer to the the metro area but out here it's just completely gone and the mine site is also completely gone so say what you will about Alcoa I'm not a massive fan of them personally but it looks like they've done a good enough job but apparently they haven't so yeah in future videos I do plan to actually use the microphone properly which I've spent a lot of money on so I'm pretty disappointed about that but if you would like to see future videos please subscribe and like not only does it feed my ego but it also just helps with the YouTube algorithm and the last video about Brook has done incredibly well so if you're coming in from that video hello I think there's a car coming so I'm going to wrap this up so see you in the next video hopefully if you don't think I'm too much of a big stupid dum-dum [Music]

Channel: Brendan's Odyssey

Views: 21,886

Keywords: abandoned, railway, line, jarrahdale, mundijong, bauxite, mine, alcoa

Id: 3wnTWVwRPvg

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023