Podcasts 2023: A whistle stop tour of Queensland early railways

Ever since the colony of Queensland was formed there have always been the railways somewhere in the background.

Railway workers at Barcaldine in Central Western Queensland in the early 20th Century. Photo: The State Library of Queensland.

Ever since childhood, when he lived within earshot of Maryborough station, in Victoria’s old gold country, my grandfather seldom heard a train or glimpsed a moving carriage and wished he was not on it.

This was not so much an expression of youthful adventure as a more prosaic instinct: it was about sounds and smells, machinery and timetables, gauges and networks and an ever-expanding glossary of locomotive lingo that marked him out as a “child of the railways”.

His father, a station master, dragged his family across the state to a new posting every couple of years, and so a peculiar brand of patriotism – centred on Australia’s early railways – flourished, and holds true today. With that inheritance came a certain degree of entitlement, including constant boasting rights about the times “when things actually worked” in Victoria (the railways) and those mod projects that have set the state back ever since.

The advent of Myki – that perennially broken down and outdated system – seemed to guarantee him limitless bragging rights.

A decorated engine at the Railway Picnic, Bundaberg, 1931.

Yet railway patriotism/nostalgia does not stop at the Victorian border. Nor is it the preserve of an older generation with happy memories of steam and whistles. It moves right across the continent, down the family tree and past the old break-of-gauge barriers into a different era altogether.

In Queensland Rail History, a podcast produced and narrated by staff of the state’s train operator, the pioneering spirit and patriotism of the early railways is delivered with a strong local vibe, as hosts Greg Hallam and Annette Caesar conduct a journey of their own from the earliest days of the railway right up to construction of Roma Street Station. Hallam, a historian from a third-generation Queensland railway family, based in Toowoomba, lives and breathes everything locomotive. There could be few people in the state or perhaps nation better equipped at narrating the history of the country’s early railways.

The series opens in Southern Queensland, where the story of the colony’s first railway begins to take shape in the 1860s, shortly after its separation from NSW.

It’s an exciting time for the new colony. Newspaper reports of the first railway between ­Ipswich to Grandchester (Bigges Camp) are devoured by an eager public. Its chief engineer, the eccentric Irishman, Abram Fitzgibbon, is introduced as an early champion of the narrow gauge (3ft. 6 inch), and soon enough a controversial figure at the centre of a political maelstrom concerning his plans to introduce the Anglo Cape gauge to the fledgling colony.

It is the first narrow-gauge main line built in the world, and remains the second largest ­narrow-gauge network.

The Longreach Railway Station in the early 20th century. Photo: State Library of Queensland.

The podcast covers an impressive sweep of history, punctuated with colourful characters and dramatic yarns. The ambitious construction of the Cairns to Kuranda railway, through the dense northern tropics, is narrated in vibrant detail, with roustabout bushman and explorer Christie Palmerston marking out a train route that would eventually link vital supplies to the starving miners in Herberton. Equally, the ­creation of the Main Range Railway from ­Murphys Creek to Toowoomba is described, quite literally, as a Sisy­phean task, as labourers and engineers battled the steep escarpments of the Great Dividing Range.

Even the most ardent train­spotter will find dull moments in this podcast but the dry passages are worth the wait. The main achievement of this series is to take the history of Queensland’s early railways and paint a broader picture depicting the industrial and social development of the Sunshine State into the 21st century, with rich pickings for railway patriots – young and old.

Remy Varga is on leave.

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