Windmill Hill Cutting is a large cutting on the

dual gauge In railway engineering, "gauge" is the transverse distance between the inner surfaces of the heads of two rails, which for the vast majority of railway lines is the number of rails in place. However, it is sometimes necessary for track to c ...

railway east of Toodyay in

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

. The cutting was constructed between 1963 and 1964 for the Eastern Railway route through the Avon Valley, and is part of the interstate standard gauge railway connecting

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...

with the rest of Australia.

At the eastern end of the valley, Leighton Contractors Ltd. began work on three large cuttings near Toodyay. At the Windmill Hill, where it had been planned to bore a tunnel, they had to drill and blast through solid granite rock to a depth of almost 35 metres. Nearly half a million tons of rock were to be moved, yet only thirty men and a few large machines were used.

The route became operational in February 1966. The lookout point for the cutting has a plaque that claims ''one of the deepest in Australia'', with the depth at 35 metres and length as 175 metres. The Avon Valley cuttings had also uncovered sections of unstable rock, and effort was made to fix walls where required. Due to the size of the cutting, the underlying geology is exposed to give a clear exposure of rock formations. It was nominated as a geological heritage site in the 1990s. Image:Windmill Hill Cutting plaque.jpg, Plaque at lookout. Image:Windmill Hill Cutting east.jpg, Looking east towards Northam.

References

Railway cuttings in Australia Rail infrastructure in Western Australia Eastern Railway (Western Australia) Toodyay, Western Australia {{Coord, 31, 35, S, 116, 30, E, region:AU-WA_type:city, display=title

See also

References