About the Hide
You are looking for a mega-bison cache container. The lid is attached to ground zero, so you'll need to unscrew the base to reveal the contents instead. Please don't park right on the corner in crushing season. There is plenty of room for parking, but McLeod St can be quite busy with cane trucks and they do need to turn onto Cane Road. Watch yourself at ground zero, there is a small amount of barbed wire in the area.
About the Site
The rails found near Ground Zero belong to the NSW Government standard gauge (1435mm) line that carried sugar cane to the mill. This is the line with the steam locomotive in the picture of the Condong Mill attached to the cache page. That late 1960s picture also shows the mill’s own 610mm (2 foot) gauge sugar tramway, with the smaller diesel locomotives, delivering cane.
Back in the ‘old days’, the cane fields of the region would have been busy with cane being brought in to the mill via the smaller 2 foot gauge tramway, as well as cane transported from Crabbes Creek, 27 km south of the Condong mill, via the government railway. This is the railway line which can be seen paralleling the Tweed Valley Way to Murwillumbah.
You might also note in the picture, some road hauled large cane bins which led to the demise of both the mill’s tramway and the government line. The mill system finished at the end of the 1974 season and the government sugar traffic around the same time.
The white car in the picture is heading south on the then Pacific Highway, which in that era was the road right outside the mill. This is the road between the cache and mill, renamed McLeod St when the 1970s Condong highway bypass was built about 100 metres east. That 1970s bypass was itself renamed Tweed Valley Way when the present-day Pacific Motorway was built on a new alignment several kms to the east in the early 2000s. There was a level crossing for both the government line and the mill’s tramway between the cache and the mill. The tramway, as shown by the 1960s image, was on the northern side of the government line. The photo site has been redeveloped as Condong mill’s biomass cogeneration electricity plant.
The government standard gauge line was opened to Murwillumbah and Condong on 24 December 1894, having already opened from Lismore to Byron Bay and Mullumbimby in May that same year. The 4km standard gauge branch line from Murwillumbah to Condong was built to transport sugar cane.
Lismore’s Northern Star newspaper for Wednesday 20 January 1897 gave the 1896 season total for cane haulage on the government line to Condong as 14,000 tons. That same newspaper noted ‘a lot of cane’ was sent 80 km from Eltham, in the Lismore Bangalow region, to Condong. But those distant regions eventually moved into dairy, which reduced the amount of cane delivered over that part of the government line. Cane tonnages on the government line increased following the development of the Crabbes Creek cane district. The Condong mill established a 610mm (2 foot) gauge sugar tramway at Crabbes Creek in 1921. This tramway cane was transferred to the government standard gauge wagons at Crabbes Creek Station for haulage to the mill. The steam locomotive in the main picture would have delivered Crabbes Ck cane.
The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) opened Condong mill in 1880 and sold it to NSW Sugar Milling Co-operative Ltd in 1978. These days the mill is owned by Sunshine Sugar which is a partnership between the grower-owned NSW Sugar Milling Co-operative Limited and the Manildra Group. CSR’s Pyrmont sugar refinery had its own wharf on the western portion of Sydney Harbour, so processed cane, including molasses, was originally sent by ships to Sydney. Eventually it travelled over the government railway after the cessation of coastal shipping. Road haulage ultimately replaced rail.