At the end of 2014, a section of railway track was revealed when council workers excavated the top end of Bay Street for roadworks. There had always been a bit of an urban myth around town about whether the rails were still under the bitumen, obviously it turned out to be true. If you look under the ‘head’ of some of the rails you can still see old bitumen stuck to the steel.
The South Coast rail line was built in 1903 and extended down into Tweed Heads right from the beginning. A number of properties along the western side of Enid Street were resumed to accommodate the station, freight yard and engine shed. Restitution to the property owners for their land was paid for by the Queensland Government.
In early 2015 part of the railway crossing was returned to the median strip and the area made over as a monument to the Tweed Heads section of the line. We found a close examination of the remains revealing. All train rail is embossed with the name of the steelworks where it was produced and the year it was manufactured. This is usually found on the inside face of the rail. This particular section was made at the Moss Bay Iron Works in Cambria UK in 1902 which suggests that its part of the original track laid down during construction of the line, ie this part of the level crossing was never replaced in the lifetime of the South Coast line.
The metal plates where the rails are connected to the sleepers underneath are called sleeper plates. The sleeper plates are fixed to the sleepers with large fasteners called ‘dog spikes’. What we did not realise initially was that while all the dog spikes on the monument are typical ‘Queensland’ spikes, there is one different. Apparently it’s a NSW dog spike. Can you spot the difference and identify the ‘foreign’ dog spike.
While GZ is not actually “on” the monument, we invite you to cross over to the median strip and have a look at this section of preserved crossing. While you are unlikely to be run over by a train, the usual care in crossing a busy road should be taken.
The cache itself is a nano (sorry to all those nano haters) so you’ll have to BYO pen.
