Adventure Time: Box Vale Tramway Walking Track

Near Mittagong

Distance: 8.7km return

Duration: ~ 4 hours

We were looking for a peaceful adventure on ANZAC day and Richie found this nice little walk on the other side of Mittagong.

Box Vale walking track follows an old train cutting with a tunnel near the end, and passes some historic coal mining bits and pieces through lovely cool southern highlands forest. In autumn it was absolutely full of a myriad of frilly, lumpy and blobby toadstools which were fun to photograph.

The tramway line was built in 1888 to carry coal mined in Nattai Gorge to the main line at Mittagong. The line passes through several cuttings and a tunnel, and ends at the "incline", where coal was brought up from the gorge. It was closed in 1896 and the tramway abandoned, and was later opened as a walking track in 1996.

And we hit a milestone today... 4 hours walking, nearly 9km - the furthest we've gone as a family, yet there was no fighting, no whining; they had fun and collected rocks and played with sticks and Ty took a bunch of photos which I had to include at the bottom of this post as his hashtags crack me up...

The trailhead begins at a well maintained gravel path with a few steps which then crosses this little stream.

The track is easy to navigate and mostly flat - being an old train track there are no biting hills, although the large rocks that have tumbled down into the cuttings make for short patches of jumping or scrambling.

This pretty area has a network of trails that criss-cross each other, but on this day our walk took us from the trailhead at Mt Alexander Reserve, just off Boxvale Rd at Welby, along the Box Vale Tramway Walking Track, through the Casurina Cutting and along Box Vale Fire Trail, which again became the Tramway track, turned into Boulder Cutting, Fern Cutting through the tunnel and finally ending at a lovely lookout.

(That sounds super complicated but actually it's just one main trail that changes names.)

Holly found a stick and named it Captain Risky, and a special sharp rock called Trusty. Trusty was used to shave Captain Risky's back hair. Then Risky came in handy as a hiking pole, helping her get through the cuttings.

*Edit - 6 months later Trusty is still in our front yard and Holly still asks what happened to Captain Risky. The dog ate him.

Close to the end of the trail is the approach to the old train tunnel - this isn't so dark or long that you need a torch although we had a couple with us for fun. Being only 85 metres long it's not pitch dark so unfortunately isn't a likely spot for glow worms.

This lookout at the end gave a great view of the Nattai river down below. Looking out to the horizon we could see the Blue Mountains peaks of Cloudmaker and Guouogang.

The kids were excited to organise their rock collection while we stopped and ate sandwiches and strawberries at the lookout.

We took another little break on the way back, still super surprised that there hadn't been any fighting yet!

Holly loved the colours of all these rocks and had to hold on to them till the end.... in addition to the stack she had already given me that we clonking about in my pockets. Along with a handful of coal we'd found, we carried quite a bit of weight back to the car!