Coal and iron built Lithgow, and the town has never quite pretended otherwise. It lies in a bowl on the western side of the Blue Mountains, where the plateau drops toward the inland plains, and for a century it was New South Wales's industrial heart. The first blast furnace in Australia to make iron from local ore was lit at Eskbank in the 1870s, a small-arms factory opened here in 1912, and coal mines honeycombed the surrounding hills. Today there are about five thousand people in the town proper, a main street with solid brick pubs, and the kind of cafés where nobody minds muddy boots.
That industrial past is oddly easy to enjoy. The Zig Zag Railway, a heritage line, preserves a piece of Victorian engineering in which trains reversed their way down the mountain face on switchbacks. Hassans Walls Lookout, just south of town, gives a long view over the valley and the chimneys, and it is a fine place to sit with a thermos at the end of a ride. Further out, the sandstone country of Wollemi National Park stretches north, so rugged that a stand of living Wollemi pines, thought extinct for millions of years, was found there in 1994.
For riders arriving along the Bells Line of Road, Lithgow is where the long plateau stage ends and the bike can come off the boil. The road drops off the mountains with some pleasant bends, through eucalypt and past old coal towns, and the temperature rises noticeably as you lose altitude. In winter the early mornings here can bite, with frost on the grass and breath-clouds at the petrol pumps.
The town is a proper service stop, with fuel, supermarkets, a hospital and motels, so you can sort anything you have been putting off. If you need a rest, the old rail station area has a few places to eat, and the pie shops in the district are tough competition for any chain. Lithgow is not a postcard, but it is honest, and the history underfoot makes it more interesting than it first appears. Stop long enough to look at the big furnace ruins, and you will leave with a better feel for how this country was built.