The Federation Trail
The Federation Trail is a 23 kilometre-long shared use path for cyclists and pedestrians, which mainly follows the heritage-listed Main Outfall Sewer through the western suburbs of Melbourne.
The trail was officially opened on 22 October 2006.
In 2010 work started on extending the trail from Millers Road to Williamstown Rd. Completion of stage 1 of the VicRoads Truck Action Plan should see the trail finally connected from Williamstown Road to the Hobsons Bay Coastal Trail on Hyde Street. In March 2011, work on the extension stopped completely, due to a change of government and troubles with funding and design of the bridge to Fogarty Avenue. Thirteen hundred metres of concrete path had been built which lay idle until November 2014, when the bridge was completed.
In November 2014, VicRoads announced that the trail has been extended from Millers Road to Fogarty Avenue in Yarraville with the completion of the 124-metre-long Brooklyn Bridge over the Brooklyn freight line.
Finally, this joining section has been reopened! So I am reinstalling the previous cache here.
The Cache
Purple Dreamer was a prolific cacher based in Wangaratta, she would have loved the colour of this fence!
Former Yarraville Woollen Mills
The Melbourne Woollen Mills/Morlynn Insulators site is significant as a rare and substantially intact example of mid nineteenth century industrial building specifically adapted to the needs of a woollen mill.
The building is historically significant as one of the earliest woollen mills in Australia, the first woollen mill in Melbourne and for its association with the prominent mill builders and managers Edwin and Walter Gaunt. It is also important as an early example of recycling of an industrial building for other uses, in this case, its conversion to a pottery in 1889, and as a major manufacturer of porcelain insulators in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It seems to have now been converted to a graffiti site!