Forestry - Old Growth continued

Without railways the timber industry could not have functioned. The 1890s saw a boom in the forest industry in Western Australia with a flood of English capital funding the construction of both railways and mills. By 1898 there were 9 major companies with 27 mills operating and over 950,000 acres (384,465 hectares) of forest under lease. This rush of speculative capital subsided in the twentieth century, but it had established an infrastructure which would serve the industry for many decades.