Crystal Brook–Broken Hill railway line
railway line in New South Wales and South Australia
The Crystal Brook–Broken Hill railway line is a 371 kilometre line running from Crystal Brook to Broken Hill on the Australian Rail Track Corporation network.
History
In the 1875, the South Australian Railways built a narrow gauge line from Port Pirie to Gladstone. This was extended to Cockburn in 1888, where it joined with the Silverton Tramway.
In April 1963, the federal government decided to replace the narrow gauge line with a new standard gauge line to create an East-West rail corridor from Sydney to Perth. The new line opened in January 1970. Parts of the new line are on a different alignment than the old narrow gauge route. For example, the new line bypasses the town of Oodla Wirra, and followed a new alignment rather than the route of the Silverton Tramway.
In 1982, the Adelaide to Port Augusta line was converted to standard gauge. As part of this the junction with the Port Pirie to Broken Hill line was moved 24 kilometres east to Crystal Brook.
The 371 kilometre line is single track throughout with 13 crossing loops.
“Crystal Brook–Broken Hill railway line” enters the record as railway line in New South Wales and South Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Crystal, Brook and Broken can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5191144. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1875, 1888, 1963 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crystal Brook–Broken Hill railway line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.