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.
South Eastern main line
In 1857, a new direct connection was put in at Tunbridge Junction, enabling trains to reach Hastings without reversing. The station at Tonbridge was rebuilt on a new site just west of the original. The LCDR built their line to Dover, which opened in 1861, providing a route to London that was shorter that the SER line via . In May 1862, authorisation was obtained to construct a new railway from , London to Tunbridge, which reduced the distance from London to Tonbridge and points east by about . Construction of the tunnels was well-supervised by the SER, for it had been discovered by this time that the contractors who had built the tunnels on the Hastings line had skimped on the construction by using an insufficient number of rings of bricks to line the tunnels. Rectification resulted in a restricted loading gauge on that line, a situation that was to last until 1986. This "cut-off" line, in length, reached on 1 July 1865. This station was replaced with a new one further south which opened on 2 March 1868 when the line was extended to and . The line between Sevenoaks and Tunbridge opened to freight in February 1868, and passengers on 1 May 1868. Sevenoaks Tunnel took five years to build, from 1863–68, It is long. On opening, it was the fifth longest railway tunnel in the United Kingdom. This new line meant that the old main line from Redhill was relegated to branch line status.