August 14-Sept 4
Mount Morgan is conveniently located only 40km from Rockhampton with the more peaceful surrounds of a small old mining town. It has a good selection of local shops but being so close to Rocky many chose to do their major shopping there.
Two caravan Parks are on the same side of town as you approach from the West and before you crest the last rise into town; because of this phone reception is only just there and internet required very careful positioning of the modem!
Mount Morgan was a gold mining town and after many years of inactivity the mine is poised to be re-opened by Carbide Resources to reprocess the tailings and recover Gold, Copper and Pyrite. As of June the last hurdle was final environmental approvals.
The town has many historic buildings and this time we didn’t get to explore everywhere but did visit the Railway Museum.
Around 2km of the line to here was a rack railway, often referred to as the ABT system after the Swiss engineer who developed it. One of the two locos used on this system is now running on the Queenstown ABT Railway in Tasmania.
We had to wait for our new caravan batteries to arrive as there had been a ten-day delay so decided to wait it out here. During the first week, Olivia had a bit of an emergency so Frances went own on the Tilt Train to give her a hand for 12 days which didn’t interrupt any plans really and gave me the chance to do some other work on the caravan.
The front boot lid and side panels were vinyl covered and were lifting and not looking very smart so I decided to remove the vinyl and spray the panels with “Spray Skin”, the same stuff usually used to spray car bonnets flat black.
There ended up being a row of staples down the middle of each side panel where they were stapled to the timber frame so this needed a bit of aluminium trim to cover and neaten the appearance.
Finally, we left Mount Morgan and travelled via Rockhampton to pick up a couple of things and headed West towards Emerald…