Scenic World Blue Mountains: the rides, the tickets and which tours include them

The Railway is why people come, and it is the ride children talk about on the drive home. A glass-roofed carriage leaves the top station, tilts, and drops 310 metres through a natural cleft in the sandstone at an incline of 52 degrees, which makes it the steepest passenger railway on earth. It began life hauling coal out of the Jamison Valley in the 1880s and has carried visitors since 1945.

The seats can be set to three angles. Most people choose the steepest and then hold on. The whole descent takes under two minutes, and at the bottom you are in the rainforest with the Walkway in front of you.

On a tour you arrive with the ride already paid for. On a busy school-holiday afternoon that is the difference between one queue and two.

The Skyway is a cable car with a glass floor that crosses 720 metres of open gorge at 270 metres above the valley, with Katoomba Falls below and the Three Sisters off to one side. It runs between two top stations, so it is a crossing rather than a descent, and it is the ride people with a fear of heights ask about. The glass is opaque until the cabin is clear of the station; you can stand on the solid edge if you would rather.

The Cableway is the working horse: the biggest cable car in the country, dropping 545 metres from the top station to the valley floor and bringing everybody back up at the end. Most tours ride the Railway down, walk part of the Walkway, and take the Cableway up. The Skyway is the crossing you do first or last.

At the bottom of the Railway and the Cableway a boardwalk runs through the rainforest of the valley floor: 2.4 kilometres of it in total, with shorter loops of ten, twenty and forty minutes. It passes the old coal mine entrance and a miner’s hut, and it is the one part of Scenic World that is quiet even on a busy day.

Tours usually allow time for one of the shorter loops. The small-group days walk more of it; the coach days ride more and walk less. Either way it is flat, shaded and wheelchair friendly for the first section.

Four rides, one ticket. The Railway, the Skyway, the Cableway and the Walkway are all on a day pass, and eleven of the twelve tours here include it.

The Railway is the one. Fifty-two degrees through the cliff; under two minutes; the thing children remember.

Go after lunch. Tours that ride in the early afternoon wait least, and every listing from $142 arrives with the ticket in hand.

Scenic World is the reason families choose the Blue Mountains over a harbour day, and it earns it: the Railway is a two-minute thrill that a six-year-old and a grandparent can share in the same carriage, the Skyway is a cable car with a view rather than a ride, and the Walkway is flat boardwalk with tree ferns overhead. Prams manage the Walkway’s first section and the Cableway without trouble.

For anybody with a bad knee the arithmetic is simple: ride down, walk the flat, ride up. The Railway and the Cableway do every metre of climbing, and the only steps of any length are the ones you choose to take on the Giant Stairway from Echo Point, which no tour requires.

For anybody nervous of heights, the Skyway is the one to think about, and it is the one you can skip. Every tour here that includes the rides lets you sit the Skyway out and take the Cableway across the same ground lower down. Say so to the guide at the top station and the day carries on.