SteamRanger keeps alive Goolwa-Victor Harbor cockle train line with 1854 origins as Australia's oldest
An historic SteamRanger steam locomotive pulling the cockle train between Goolwa and Victor Harbor along the Fleurieu Peninsula coast.
Image courtesy SteamRanger Heritage Railway
The cockle tourist train, operated by SteamRanger Heritage Railway and running up to 140 days a year between Goolwa and Victor Harbor on South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula, kept alive Australia’s oldest iron railway, to link the River Murray and the wharfs at Port Elliot and later Victor Harbor. The origins of the line – Australia's first – were for a horse-drawn tram between Goolwa and Port Elliot from 1854.
The line was built for the River Murray trade of the 19th Century but this role diminished after a more direct line was built from Adelaide through Kapunda to Morgan. The original line from the Goolwa jetty headed to the centre of Port Elliot. Port Elliot's lack of shelter and shallow achorage forced port activity to be moved to Victor Harbor and the railway line extended there and opened in 1864. The line was extended north to Strathalbyn from Middleton in 1869 and linked to Adelaide in 1884.
The cockle train’s name is derived from early days of colonial settlement when locals would take a horse-drawn train to Goolwa to make a day’s outing of collecting cockles from the sandy beaches near the River Murray mouth. It operated along the Fleurieu Peninsula coast with a steam locomotive in school holidays, over Easter and every Sunday and Wednesday with historic diesel locomotives or railcars.
SteamRanger Heritage Railway, the only group operating broad gauge steam locomotives, iwas run by volunteers of the South Australian division of the Australian Historical Railway Society. Before 1995, SteamRanger was based at Dry Creek in Adelaide’s northern suburbs and home to the main road-rail freight depots. It operated the Southern Encounter operated from Adelaide railway station through the Mounty Lofty Ranges to Victor Habour plus other special train runs on the broad gauge network to places such as Burra and Nuriootpa.
With the shutting of the country rail network and the Adelaide-to-Wolseley section of the Adelaide-Melbourne line converted to standard gauge in 1995, the broad-gauge line between Mount Barker Junction and Victor Harbor was left isolated. The previous Australian National operator had declared the Mount Barker Junction-Strathalbyn section unsafe in 1989 but it was renewed with state government funding and SteamRanger service services resumed with its volunteers maintaining its trains and the rail line.
In 2023, SteamRanger Heritage Railway received $8.9 million from the South Australian government for much-needed remediation works. The historic attraction, rolling out 70,000 passenger journeys each year, ran from Mount Barker to Victor Harbor and included the popular cockle train. Remediation works were carried out on bridges at Currency Creek, Watson's Gap and Hindmarsh River, as well as Tookayerta Creek and Finniss River.
