A bridge that needed a jolly good walking to.

If you’ve ever driven along the Western Ring Road in Melbourne, no doubt you will have crossed the E. J. Whitten Bridge (onya Ted).

Perhaps like me you might even have parked the car on the bridge along with all your new friends as the freeway grinds to a halt in peak-hour. If so and you had looked around you, you would have noticed a magnificent old railway bridge off to the east. You might have been parked there long enough to see a train cross over it.

Enthralled by: things to do, places to go and people to see, it has long been an ambition to walk to the bridge and have a gander at the wonders of engineering practice on display. One problem is its location is not close to any easy access. Now, you can walk the creek-line from the Brimbank National Park, but that seems such a long way to go to walk to a bridge.

Info from the Keilor Historic Site is here http://home.vicnet.net.au/~khis/trestle_bridge.html

After some contemplation and a bit of google earth searching and ‘driving’ around on the street maps my friend, Dieter, discovered that there was a reasonable access down the slope from a small lookout point.

So armed with this bit of useful info, and a degree of gallantry we decided that the bridge did indeed deserve a jolly good walking to, and we would take on the challenge.

We met and parked the cars in a side street near the lookout and followed the track along until we found a ‘vehicle management track’ not sure what sort of vehicle you could manage on the track, but we did safely follow it to the creek below.

A short interesting walk along the river and we were at the bridge. Insert appropriate appreciative sound effects.

I also heard the ‘pip pip pip’ of a Sacred Kingfisher and then another call, and another. In the end I suspect there are three kingfisher territories down there.

We eventually made our way up the management track back to the cars and off to a Greek restaurant for a well deserved meal. And another adventure ticked off the list.