Northern Rivers Rail Trail - Again - But Different

 

Dan had a mate from Cairns coming to south east Queensland for a month for a work gig and as Steve was a keen cyclist, thought it would be a good idea to show him the Northern Rivers Rail Trail. I thought so too and I also thought I should come along as I had heard a lot about Steve and what he does for a living.

Leaving early because we would lose an hour crossing into NSW with its Daylight Saving Time thing kicking in that morning we picked Steve up at his Kingscliff abode.  It wasn't much longer until we were unloading at the old railway station in Murwillumbah.  The car park was full and there were dozens of people milling around, even at 0730.

We didn't muck around,  getting the bikes off the rack and our bums onto seats. The trail starts off fully sealed which makes for an easy warm up. It soon turns to well manicured gravel though and enters almost constant tree cover. 

There wasn't much traffic once we got away from the trail head which allowed us to chat a bit. 

Dan had met Steve while working in Singapore during the Covid years.  While Dan came home to his current employer,  Steve chose to go completely off piste from his previous profession.  He landed a job with the Australian Armour And Artillery museum in Cairns! 

I had never heard of the museum prior to Covid but being able to watch plenty of YouTube content during that time I had stumbled onto their amazing "Workshop Wednesday " series of restoration posts. To say what they do with the sometimes small pile of scrap metal that they have to work with is an understatement! They have a huge array of drivable tanks and vehicles from every protagonist in World War II and many from the following decades, most painstaking restored from the ground up. 

Steve, like the other employees, is a jack of all trades working on anything from a 1940s Stug transmission to a more modern Leopard tank. He is currently down here operating two Shermans for a $100M Netflix movie that is being filmed right near Murwillumbah. Check the link above or the  YouTube clips I have posted below and go from there! Be prepared to be sucked down that awesome rabbit hole though!

Yeah, they get the tanks out once a year in Augaust for AusArmourFest! 

The Burringbar tunnel didn't disappoint. While it is a long slog climbing up to it, you get to coast downhill through it. At about 900m in length you definitely need lights lest you start to lose balance with no visual cues in the dark at it's centre. 

We quickly rolled through to the end of the trail just past Stokers Siding. 

While there is a bollard at the end of the trail it was clear that people had been riding around it and continuing along the sleepers, between the rails. People are keen for the trail to continue!

We turned around here today as our bikes weren't really suitable for that style of trail....plus the fact that we were getting a little hungry. So it was off to the Moo Moo cafe' at Moobal for a slap up breakfast.

The cafe' was busy with cyclists, motorcyclists and general tourists. It was far busier than it had been during visits pre rail trail. I bet people are wondering why they fought the idea of a rail trail for so many years - like they still do in so many other places around Australia.

Time to head for home - well, the car anyway and it was muuuch busier on the way back as people had rolled out of bed.

The main trouble with the trail is that it is too popular. Hire bike companies have sprung up and they hire out electric bikes with small diameter fat tyres that look difficult to control. Couple this with inexperienced cyclists wobbling all over the trail and you get head on incidents. We stopped to chat to a woman who had a small child on her bike that had been crashed into by some other women in the tunnel. I almost had a big head on myself when one of a bunch of young women coming the other way wobbled headlong onto my side of the trail. Some locked brake/sideways action saw me narrowly avert a prang.

The answer to me is to open more trail to spread the load out (plus to also ride early before the general public is roused). At only 24km long the trail is being massively oversubscribed. Here's hoping that the adjoining councils look to cash in on the tourism bonanza and open their sections of trail.

Anyway, it was a very nice day out that we capped off with a beer in the Riverview Hotel, across the road from the old railway station. Steve filled us in on a few details about the tank museum and the movie that he is working on. Bloody interesting stuff! Here is another link to one of the MANY YouTube videos that the museum has up.

Enjoy!

Cheers.