TRAVELBUG:

A true train tragic couldn’t care less how long Queensland’s premier passenger train service takes to meander its way up from Brisbane to north Queensland, right?

Or whether the Spirit of Queensland gets up to an hour-and-a-half behind schedule on both legs of a recent Brisbane to Townsville and return rail experience to see family, right? Surely, just more time to press one’s eager face against the window, watch the engine a long way ahead curl around corners and shout “Toot! Toot!” or “Choo! Choo! Choo!” over and over, much to the understandable concern of other passengers?

So, okay, maybe I’m not the train tragic I thought I was.

Below are the two messages received from QR with both there-and-back services already well behind schedule.

Enduring a non-window sitter in what should have been an 18hour 40minute journey either way proved painful enough for this poor old bloke with a bung knee and a demanding bladder but to find both outbound and homeward bound journeys up to an hour and a half behind schedule by half-way begs the question: how on earth does that happen?

A delay would be instantly forgiven if, as happened recently, a Greyhound bus involved in a fatal collision had ended up on the tracks or a fertiliser truck had blown a big crater to make the adjacent Bruce Highway even more dangerous than it already was.

But our SoQ delays seemed totally inexplicable. My personally selected SoQ service left Roma Street dead on time at 3.45pm – possibly the only time it was – and it was way behind schedule by the time it reached Rockhampton in the early hours of the next morning. Ditto coming home.

What is it with Queensland Rail? They don’t know how many passenger and freight trains are going to be sharing the network at any given time? This now possibly former train tragic appreciates that there are still long stretches of single track up to the deep north, ay, but various services must be able to hog those stretches on time and for the allotted time? The times the SofQ needs to spend on a siding waiting for a more important money-making freight/coal train service to trundle past must all be considered in said timetabling, surely?

The northbound journey was particularly daunting. It was after daybreak somewhere north of Proserpine that the train came to rest in some god-damned awful part of the world. No sugar cane fields to admire; just dirt-poor mongrel coastal scrub country where one kangaroo per 100 hectares would have trouble surviving.

We sat there for what seemed like an eternity before the on-board announcement revealed that the engine drivers had spotted a problem with the track and had climbed down to take a look.

And fair enough too. We should be thankful that the SofQ sometimes travels at a low enough speed to make the track ahead very, very visible. Its lack of speed is a safety feature, then? So good on our drivers for spotting whatever the problem was! A loose spike perhaps?

It was at this time that I detrained myself for my own safety check of Queensland’s embarrassingly narrow 3ft 6in track but to be honest it looked fine to me.

A while later the PA announced the track was apparently fine; the problem now was a technical/engineering one with the locomotive itself.

No doubt other passengers shared my thoughts as I imagined that scene from Planes ,Trains and Automobiles as Steve Martin and John Candy struggled with Candy’s trunk across paddocks to waiting buses and much-longer delays.

The problem was eventually resolved, however, and later that morning we limped into Townsville, only a fashionable 40 minutes late by then.

Don Gordon-Brown

TO BE CONTINUED

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