.Great Southern Road - Cullerin 1.
The Main Roads Management Act of June 1858 declared the Great Southern Road, from near Sydney through Goulburn and Gundagai to Albury, as one of the three main roads in the colony. Today we know it as the Hume Highway, named after Hamilton Hume the travelling partner of William Hovell on their overland journey from Appin (near Campbelltown)to Port Phillip and return in 1824.
Over the years the road has had a few name changes and seen many realignments, some minor and some major with entire towns being bypassed and the section of the route north of Marulan being totally different to today's Hume Highway. So I thought that I would do a series of caches based on the old sections of the Hume Highway and the Great Southern Road.
This cache is placed in the Cullerin Ranges where the alignment of the Main Highway South has seen many changes. To access this you will need to drive along the Old Hume Highway which was in use up until 1994 (kinda scary isn’t it) and then turn off at either of the posted access points onto what is sign posted as “Old Sydney Rd”. The interesting history on this section of the road is that it was built in 1920 mainly on the old alignment of the Sydney-Melbourne railway.
The alignment of the rail line was made to ease the gradients against heavily laden Sydney bound steam trains. Have a look on Google earth and you can see plenty of evidence of the realignment of both the road and rail lines, with the rail lines now taking a very loopy way through the Cullerin Ranges
Cache is a 1lt Sistema container with log and the usual swaps.