The railway was never built for scenery. It was built for copper. The Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company opened the first section in 1896 and pushed it through to Strahan by November 1899, carving a path the engineers had been told was impossible. Ore had to reach the port, and there was no other way out. Until a road link to Hobart was completed in 1932, this line was the only practical access through to Queenstown. Everything came and went on these rails: the copper, the men, the mail, the machinery, the news. The terrain fought back the whole way. Because of the punishing gradients, the trains could only haul limited loads, inching their cargo down to the sea one careful descent at a time.

The line's drama is geological. Leaving Queenstown, the track threads the gorge of the King River, where the engine drops onto the rack rail and grinds down toward the water through a tunnel of dripping green. Here the contrast is total. Above the gorge lie the bare, eroded hills that mining stripped of life; below, the rainforest closes in, thick with myrtle beech, leatherwood, and tree ferns that have never known a clear day. The original Quarter Mile Bridge near Teepookana was swept away by a flood in 1974, and its replacement sits just south of where the first one stood. At the bottom, the King River runs the colour of weak tea and old metal, still carrying the chemical memory of a century of ore.

The last passenger service ran on 29 June 1963, and the railway closed that August. Road improvements, especially the opening of the Murchison Highway from the north, had made the slow, costly line obsolete. The track was lifted, the bridges left to rot, and the rainforest began reclaiming the formation. For more than thirty years it sat abandoned. Then, in the 1990s, with the old mining operations winding down, West Coast locals campaigned to bring the Abt railway back, not as industry but as heritage. A twenty-million-dollar federal grant, matched by state and private money, made it possible. Rebuilding the line to modern standards demanded almost as much skill as the original construction had a century before.

The first reconstructed section, between Queenstown and Lynchford, opened in November 2000, and the full line followed in December 2002. Prime Minister John Howard and Premier Jim Bacon cut the ribbon in April 2003. The trains that run today are not replicas but survivors: three of the original Mount Lyell locomotives were brought back into service, built by Dübs and Company of Glasgow in the 1880s and 1890s, their boilers hammering up the same grades they climbed when copper was king. The journey has not always been smooth in its second life. A commercial operator handed the line back in 2013, and the government had to step in; full operations resumed in December 2014 under a state-owned corporation. Engineers Australia has marked the railway with an Engineering Heritage International Marker, an acknowledgement that the achievement here was never ordinary.