Sawmill

The early days. The two photos below were taken by my father Tom Pate and are of the original sawmill not long after operations began.

There will be an O scale Britannia Creek Sawmill built as we get to that section of the layout.

Here is a photo of the O scale mill engine which is the first part of the O scale mill under construction.

Please come back from time to time to see progress photos.

In the mean time, here are some old photos of Victorian Alpine region sawmills and a few nuggets of information gleamed from various sources that may be of interest.

Logging in Victoria

Tom Pate, now in his 80’s, can recall sitting next to the boiler of a Shay locomotive in the middle of Winter to keep warm as he and his work mates were taken up into the hills to start a weeks hard work felling the Mountain Ash. At the end of the week, the Shay brought them back down to rest and prepare for another week. Our logging line is inspired by these events. Tom and his brothers set up one of the many sawmills that flourished for a time in the valley, supplying timber to Melbourne. Pate’s Britannia Creek Sawmill is inspired by the real life enterprise that was located on Britannia Creek Road near the small country town of Wesburn.

The New Federal Mill taken in 1938. The log unloaders serving the three- and four-feet gauge
log tramways can be seen as can the tall three-legged tank stand that so dominated the site.

Caption & Photo - W.R.B. Johnson from ‘Mountains of Ash’ by Mike McCarthy

Tom Pate knew the chap (Louis) who lopped the three trees for this distinctive tank stand.
Log ponds where not common practice in Australian sawmills and when needed the stand
provided water pressure to sprays so that wood could be kept from drying out.

The Wesburn (previously known as West Warburton) and the Britannia Creek locality is some 60 km. east of Melbourne. A Victorian Railways branch line used to service the area. This line is now a pleasant bike path. Britannia Creek is situated in the Yarra Valley and joins the Little Yarra River shortly before the latter joins the Yarra River proper. Tradition has it that the name Britannia Creek was given by ex-Royal Navy Midshipman Charles Bowtell, a gold miner, who served on HMS Britannia during the Crimean War. 

Hermon and Laudehr’s tramway alongside Main Road West Warburton opposite Bullers Warburton Hotel c.1914 Caption & Photo - State Library of Victoria from ‘Mountains of Ash’ by Mike McCarthy

The hotel building remains to this day and a nice meal can be had there but there was no sign of the tramway when the Pate family lived in Wesburn, as it was then known, in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

In the late 1850s gold was discovered in areas around Warburton such as Britannia Creek, Scotchman’s Creek and Yankee Jim’s Creek. The forests in the area were mostly harvested by paling splitters until about 1902 when sawmilling was introduced. Steel and timber tramlines were built and a wood distillation plant was built in 1907.

The arrival of the steam railway sparked the commencement of the historical timber industry within the region. The forests throughout the Upper Yarra region had been known for their prosperous wealth of timber, since the mid 1800s, however were too far from transport to be viable. While the railway was progressing towards Warburton during the late 1800s, the first sawmill in the Yarra Valley region was being built. With the completion of the railway and the development of numerous sawmills all over the district, the timber industry flourished over the next 40 years supplying large quantities of timber to Melbourne and its surrounding regions. The fires of 1939 destroyed many of the sawmills within the Yarra Valley, forcing the timber industry to replace them with mills closer to the townships. Many of these sawmills still operate today using timber from the regions lush forest areas.

Mountain Ash

Mountain Ash is an important timber tree and is widely used in building and in the paper industry. In Australia, timber is now harvested from both natural and cultivated stands. The species is also cultivated overseas.

E.regnans is the tallest hardwood tree in the world with specimens reaching 80 metres or more in height. Some trees felled during the last century were measured at up to 114 metres. Only the softwood Californian redwoods are taller. The following extract from "Forests of Australia" by Alexander Rule (1967) indicates the massive proportions of these trees. It records the felling of a tree in the Derwent Valley, Tasmania in 1942:

"It is recorded that two expert axemen, working on a platform 15 feet above the ground, took two and a half days to cut a scarf 6 feet deep into the mighty butt as a preliminary to sending the giant toppling to earth. The crash of its fall resounded for miles around and even hardened bushworkers are said to have downed tools in silent homage to the fallen monarch. Its age was put at 400 years and it was calculated that when Abel Tasman discovered the island in 1642 this tree was already a noble specimen of between 150 and 200 feet in height."

The tree "yielded 6770 cubic feet of wood which was pulped into 75 tons of newsprint."

The species is native to wet sclerophyll forests (tall open forests) in the Otway Ranges in southern Victoria, the Gippsland Forests in eastern Victoria and north-eastern and southern Tasmania. It occurs from sea level to altitudes over 1000 metres. It is a fire-sensitive species. Unlike many other eucalypts, E.regnans is killed outright by severe fires and does not regenerate from a lignotuber or from epicormic shoots under the bark. It relies solely on seed for regeneration and can be eliminated from an area by fires which occur at frequent intervals.

The tall trunk is smooth except for the lower few metres where the bark is retained. The trunk is white or grey in colour.

Victorian Hardwood Industry

Logs are converted to timber by sawmilling - for housing, joinery, furniture, cases and crates and many miscellaneous uses; by hewing - for sleepers, beams, posts and the like; and by splitting for palings, shingles, fence posts and slabs. The main produce from the Britannia Creek mill was palings. Timber is also used as roundwood for posts, poles and piles and split roundwood for firewood.

Logs were kept wet by spraying rigs or by soaking in water to avoid cracking and splintering.

Compared with the overseas woods for which the early sawmilling technology was developed the most widely used Australian woods - the eucalypts, of which Mountain Ash is one - were denser and harder to saw.

The early mills were often built on sites with a slight gradient to facilitate movement of the heavy wood. Because of the large diameter of many of the logs the 'breaking down' operation was generally done using a 'twin rig' - one saw mounted above the other and cutting in the same plane. This could handle logs up to about 1.5 metres in diameter and any above this size would be cut on a slow speed frame saw or split. The twin rig method was introduced from Canada and its adaptation to the dense and abrasive eucalypts required considerable skill. Simple log carriages were used.

Early Victorian mountain ash sawmill, circa 1920, with twin rig and log carriage.

The breaking-down operation was followed by up to three 'breast benches', table top circular saw benches of simple design on which the flitches (a longitudinal cut from the trunk of a tree) were transported to the saw on powered, reversible rollers or by chains. The sawing operations were completed on these versatile units which were ideal for defective wood removal, but rather labour-intensive. They appear to have been an Australian innovation and later spread to New Zealand, South Africa, the Pacific Islands and parts of South America.

Drying was initially done by stacking and it could take up to three years. Kiln drying was introduced in about 1880 and greatly improved this process.

Sources and further reading:

Tom Pate, who with his brothers Arthur and Bob, established and ran the real Britannia Creek sawmill in the 1940’s and 1950’s

‘Mountains of Ash - A history of the Sawmill and Tramways of Warburton and District’ by Mike McCarthy ISBN 0 090340 41 2 (Highly recommended)

‘Britannia Creek an Essay in Wood Distillation’ by A. P. Winzenreid ISBN 0 949732 26 5 (Highly recommended)

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/multimedia/gazetteer/list/brittcrk.html

http://www.arrabri.com.au/history.htm

http://farrer.riv.csu.edu.au/ASGAP/gallery4.html

Technology in Australia 1788-1988 http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/226.html