Etheridge railway line
Although construction was delayed by strikes in mid-1908 over the pay rate for railway workers, in February 1909 the line was opened to Einasleigh from Almaden. The Einasleigh copper mine was originally discovered by Richard Daintree in the mid 1860s, but the cost of transporting ore from the site made it uneconomic and it soon closed. The location was lost until the 1890s and a renewed interest in copper on the Etheridge field. A township known as Copperfield was established on the banks of the Copperfield River to service 12 copper mining leases extant by 1899, and this was surveyed as Einasleigh in 1900. The mine was reopened that year by the Einasleigh Freehold Mining Company, in which John Moffat had acquired an interest. By 1901 copper matte from a smelter at Einasleigh was being transported to Almaden by camel train. The coming of the Etheridge Railway in 1909 allowed Einasleigh to boom, and it was the largest centre on the Etheridge between 1907 and 1910. By 1910 six ore trains a week were running from Einasleigh to the Chillagoe smelters, and in 1911 the mine was purchased by the Chillagoe Company. It closed in 1914, and was reopened by the Queensland Government between 1920 and 1922.
Edmund Wragge
On his return from Costa Rica, Wragge’s letters indicate that he worked on a project in the English Midlands for some months until Sir Charles Fox secured for him the position of chief engineer of the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway (TG&BR), and the Toronto and Nipissing Railway (T&NR) in July 1869. This placement must have been settled by telegram, because Douglas Fox left Toronto on 27 July 1869, promising to have an engineer sent out, and Edmund Wragge departed for Norway to see Pihl’s narrow gauge railways on 1 August 1869. Wragge arrived in Toronto in September 1869 and between that time and late 1874 he engineered and constructed over 280 route miles of the 3 ft 6 in gauge railways, at a total cost of £900,000. The railways were built economically as a practical means of opening up the interior of the Province of Ontario to settlement.