DEEPWATER RAILWAY STATION
CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT PLAN
SECTION 2• DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE • PAGE 6
New England landscape. As much as 125,000 cubic yards of earth and rock were blasted from Ben Lomond's `big cutting' alone.15

Contemporary newspapers provide an indication of the lumber requirements of railway line construction. When the Uralla-Glen Innes contract commenced in early 1881, for example, contractor David Proudfoot's local managers in Armidale advertised tenders for four million bricks, two hundred thousand fencing posts, one hundred and eighty thousand sleepers, as well as hardwoods suitable for bridge
construction.16

In late 1881 a Glen Innes Examiner reporter journeyed south from the town along the line to Tamworth. Construction had recently begun at various points near Glen lanes, and the reporter noted gangs of `men busily engaged in felling, burning, and clearing away the huge giants of the forests standing on the line of the route'.17Another newspaper correspondent recalled how the Tamworth-Uralla extension had been the scene of a war between railway navvies and `the giants of nature'.' 18

Fencing, for the enclosure of the railway, also consumed a significant amount of high-quality timber. A post, rail and wire fence was constructed all along the Great Northern line in New England, and around the station yards. The statistics in relation to fencing are quite staggering, for 60 miles of New England railway equated to 153,600 fencing rails, 76,800 posts and 860 miles of wire.19

Nature had a revenge of sorts at Ben Lomond, however, for here the Northern line was to prove particularly troublesome well into the Twentieth Century. A major earth-slip occurred as early as 1885 and five years later a temporary line had to be
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Sources
I5 AE, i July 1881, p. 4.
16 AE, 4 March i881, p. 1.
17 GIE, 25 October 1881, p. 2; see also I November 1881, p. 2.
18 Uralla and Walcha Times, 2 August 1882, p. 2.
19 Town and Country Journal, 13 August 1881, p. 315.