The North Australia Railway was a 509 km (316 mi) 1,067 mm narrow gauge railway in the Northern Territory of Australia which ran from the territory capital of Darwin, once known as Palmerston, to Birdum, just south of Larrimah. Initially its name was the Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway. The first section was opened 1889, the last in 1929. The railway closed in 1976.
The former station at Adelaide River, on the Stuart Highway, is now a museum housing locomotives, rolling stock and memorabilia
Commonwealth Railways narrow-gauge steam locomotive NF5, preserved at Pine Creek Railway Precinct, was built by Beyer, Peacock and Company in 1877 for the South Australian Railways as W class locomotive no. 53. It was sold to contractors for construction of the Central Australia Railway and two lines on Eyre Peninsula (being re-purchased each time by the SAR), and the Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway, on which it stayed.
One of very few remnants of the North Australia Railway in Darwin is a platform in the suburb of Winnellie
Men built narrow-gauge lines of the Northern Territory and South Australia without benefit of the mechanisation their successors enjoyed when building the standard-gauge lines a century later
The Northern Territory is an Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Australia to the west, South Australia to the south, and Queensland to the east. To the north, the territory looks out to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Western New Guinea and other islands of the Indonesian archipelago.
Thomas Baines with Aboriginal Australians near the mouth of the Victoria River.
Letters Patent annexing the Northern Territory to South Australia, 1863
The northern coast of Australia is on the left with Melville Island in the lower right
Mount Sonder, the fourth-highest mountain in the Northern Territory after nearby Mount Zeil, in West MacDonnell National Park
