Killara's Regimental Park

It was a dark and damp day, but it's probably not the most inspirational  of scenic parks anyway. Killara's Regimental Park sits on top of a water reservoir, so it's very flat and very angular.

It's got a croquet club on it, as well as some tennis courts and the usual flat green anonymous bit.

Two out of ten (for its heritage value).

Covid countdown - Bella Vista Farm Park

This one's much more interesting than the nearby Kellyville Park. It's a big park, and it's inviting, and it's well-appointed with visitor facilities.

It's also the site of the historic farm, which would normally be open to the public too. In the pandemic era you can only peer in through the fence. I'll be back one day though, to learn all about it.

Bleichert's ropey old ropeway

It operated for a mere nine months or so, before breaking up and falling in a heap on the valley floor. Its sad and rusty relics are still there after 125 years, largely out of sight and overgrown in the Blue Mountains bush.

Bleichert's Aerial Ropeway was erected in 1889 to carry kerosine shale rock from mines in the Ruined Castle area out to what's now the Scenic Railway area near Katoomba. It was state-of-the-art equipment built in Germany by Adolf Bleichert & Co. The Katoomba Coal & Shale Co. was no doubt very proud of its mighty machine, with its dozens of big buckets, innovative systems of cables, cogs, tensioning and braking mechanisms, and more.



 (Our GPS trace map courtesy of Paul Ma)




See the survey report of the Blue Mountains Heritage Institute for more on it, and on the cataloguing of its bits:
 http://www.bmwhi.org.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Final-Report-Bleichert-Ropeway-Survey-2015-.compressed.pdf   You may also be able to work out exactly how it all fitted together too. We couldn't, having seen up close all kinds of strange arrangements, with cables in rock grooves, for instance.




My Thursday Survey bushwalking group decided it was time to explore all this the other day. We expected a very arduous bush bash, with cliffs and chasms, impenetrable vegetation, and severe navigational challenges. But it wasn't actually that hard. There are often orange marker ribbons, and for much of the 3km route you're actually in sight of bits of cable, or buckets or other junk. It's a dead straight line of course, though that doesn't always help as much as you think it should, when you're in dense bush and there are varying slopes and ascents and descents of hundreds of metres.

Having made it through to the Ruined Castle track, we followed this back around to Scenic World, and some of our members took the easy way up. (Some of us didn't  and nearly beat them back anyway!)

A thoroughly satisfying and interesting little outing.





I hope the engineer who did the original loading calculations never got to work on anything important again!