On my day off from walking in the Blue MountainsNational Park in NSW I spent a day wandering around, and photographing in, the town of Lithgow. It was a stepping back into an industrial past.
Lithgow is an old coal mining town . Coal, railways and steel were put together in Lithgow prior to 1914. Lithgow was the historic powerhouse of Australia’s early industrial revolution.
Lithgow sat directly on top of massive, easily accessible coal seams and the railway provided an efficient corridor straight to Sydney, making large-scale commercial industries viable. With cheap coal and direct rail transport secured, Lithgow became the ideal location for steel making. Thus the construction of the Lithgow blast furnace in 1907 and the steel was then manufactured into railway tracks.
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