For twenty-five years, Wiluna was the end of the line. No corner of the Western Australian Government Railways reached further from Perth than this dusty terminus on the lip of the Western Desert. The track climbed to its highest point west of a tiny station called Paroo, at 2,134 feet, before running out into country where the rails simply stopped and the desert began. Trains rolled the 113 miles up from Meekatharra between 1932 and 1957, carrying gold ore out and supplies in - and then, one day in August 1957, they stopped for good.
The railway's real drama lay in what waited at its eastern terminus. Wiluna marked the southern end of the Canning Stock Route, the brutal 1,850-kilometre droving track that ran down from Halls Creek in the Kimberley through some of the harshest desert on Earth. Drovers spent months walking cattle from well to well across that emptiness. When they finally reached Wiluna, footsore and thirsty, the railway took over: the beasts were loaded into trucks and sent rolling south to market. The line was the hinge between two eras of transport - the ancient art of droving on one side, the modern certainty of steel on the other.
Building a railway across the Murchison was one thing; keeping it open was another. The track was notoriously susceptible to washaways. When the summer cyclones swept inland and dropped a year's rain in days, the floodwaters tore at embankments and left trains stranded for days at a time on the wrong side of a torrent. Newspapers of the 1940s carried headlines about the Wiluna train held up by floodwater, passengers and freight marooned in the wet. For all the permanence that rails imply, this one lived at the mercy of a desert that flooded as violently as it baked.
It might have been more than a dead-end branch. In the 1920s, before construction even began, there was serious talk of pushing rails eastward to link Wiluna with Leonora, knitting the goldfields together across the interior. A Leonora-Wiluna extension league formed to press the case. The connection never came. The authorising act passed in December 1927, construction crawled through the late 1920s, and when the line opened in 1932 it opened as a terminus - the furthest thread of a network that would reach no deeper into the desert than this.
Closure came in stages: the trains stopped in 1957, and a 1960 act of parliament formally struck the line - one of thirteen Western Australian railways killed by that single piece of legislation. At the Wiluna end, almost nothing survives. The 1930s goods shed is the lone building of the railway era still standing in town; the rest was demolished in the 1990s. At Meekatharra, more remains - the station, goods shed, and stationmaster's house sit on the local heritage list. Ironically, Meekatharra's rail yards grew busier after the Wiluna line died, becoming a hub for hauling equipment to the Pilbara's iron ore mines until improved roads finally moved the freight off the rails in the 1970s.
The Wiluna line ran roughly northeast from Meekatharra (near 26.6 degrees south, 118.5 degrees east) to Wiluna (26.59 degrees south, 120.22 degrees east), a corridor of about 180 km across the Mid West. The midpoint near 26.60 degrees south, 119.30 degrees east sits in open mulga and spinifex country where the old grade is largely reclaimed by scrub. From the air, look for the faint linear scar of the former formation and the parallel Goldfields Highway. Nearest airports are Meekatharra (ICAO YMEK) at the western end and Wiluna Airport (YWLU) at the eastern terminus. Inland conditions are usually clear with excellent visibility; watch for summer dust and cyclone-season rain that historically flooded this very route. A viewing altitude of 5,000 to 7,000 feet AGL best reveals the corridor across the desert.