ie, South Australia. As a backload to Broken Hill it transported supplies, principally coal for boilers at the mines and timber for the timber sets used underground in mining. The Silverton Tramway was owned by Broken Hill mining interests.
The main sidings and locomotive servicing facilities were located in Railwaytown, a suburb of Broken Hill with sidings running to the south and north to serve the mines. The main passenger station was at Sulphide Street.
From the later 1890s, Broken Hill Council campaigned for a tramway to provide public transport around town and to the mines. Eventually the NSW Government decided to build a tramway which was opened on 19 March 1902. It was run by steam trams transferred from Sydney by sea and then by rail across South Australia. It was a curious operation which after World War I suffered increasingly bad losses until the New South Wales Government closed the system in December 1926.
Another curiosity was the Tarrawingee Tramway which was a narrow gauge railway line which ran north from Broken Hill for about 40 miles (64 km) to an area of limestone deposit which was quarried and transported to Broken Hill for use in the smelters at the mines. The tramway opened in 1891 but closed in 1898 as the smelters moved to Port Pirie. In 1889 the Public Works Committee of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly recommended that the Government take over the line and it subsequently became a narrow gauge part of the New South Wales Government Railways (NSWGR) run under contract by Silverton Tramway.
It was an excursion train on the Silverton Tramway that was fired on by two immigrants in 1915 (see Battle of Broken Hill).
In 1919, a 4 foot 8� inch (1435 mm) standard gauge rail link from Broken Hill to Menindee was opened as the first stage in a planned direct route to Sydney. The terminus for the train was at Crystal Street station, some distance from the Silverton Tramway's Sulphide Street station. The
