We take a look at Australia's oldest railway line. It's in South Australia, near the mouth of the River Murray.


PRUE ADAMS: The location is Clayton, a tiny port within cooee of the mouth of the Murray River.

CAPTAIN RICHARD VEENSTRA: We're leaving Clayton this morning heading to Goolwa, when we get to Goolwa, there will be a reception there for us and we'll be organising the unloading of the cargo going onto the rail over to Port Elliott, where it's loaded on the One and All and sailed around to Adelaide.

PRUE ADAMS: Paddle steamers first plied the Murray during the 1850s when the river was a narrow, winding watercourse prone to drought and flood.

CAPTAIN RICHARD VEENSTRA: This proved very unsafe, they lost quite a few paddle steamers in the mouth, being very treacherous, so they decided to build the railway line to a safe shipping port.

PRUE ADAMS: And that's what last weekend's celebration was all about.

On the 18th of May 1854, Australia's first public railway was officially opened. It started at the lowest town on the River Murray, Goolwa, and terminated at Port Elliott, just seven miles away.

The early trains were not trains at all, but wagons drawn by horses on tracks.

And to this end there is some dispute over whether it could have been called a railway.

MALCOLM THOMPSON, HISTORIAN: It was a track of iron rails laid on sleepers. The fact it was horse-drawn I think is immaterial.

By 1884, 30 years after the track opened, horsepower gave way to steam power. By that time the line had already carried almost 640,000 passengers and 250,000 tons of freight.

Wheat and oranges and wine were also transported from upriver properties to rail and eventually down to Port Elliott's Horseshoe Bay.

There the cargo was loaded onto ships and sent either around to Port Adelaide, or to places more exotic like the Far East or the United Kingdom.

And while the weather smiled on re-enactment, the sailors of 150 years ago were not so lucky.

Alas Port Elliott proved to be a poor choice of harbour. It was too shallow and lacked shelter. In 7 years, 10 ships ran aground, and the track was extended around the coast, to the safer port of Victor Harbour.

So just ten years after Port Elliott was established as the seaport at the end of Australia's first public railway, it lost its claim to fame.