Railway Digest Magazine Jan-15 Back Issue

Sunlander Sunset
Depending on your point of view, Queensland Railways’ Sunlander was either a service, as much a part of the Queensland coastal landscape as the cities, plains, cane fields and mountains that have all observed its passage for six decades, or it was simply a train, made up of locomotives, rolling stock and train crew, hosting passengers and operating to a set timetable with stops and connections touching hundreds of lives, each time it undertook the journey between Brisbane and Cairns. No matter your perspective though, the Sunlander was a Queensland institution and had been since the first run departed Brisbane on 4 June 1953. Chris Walters presents a personal tribute to a very special train that has now passed into history.

Town Hall Station upgrade
Opened in 1932, Town Hall Station is one of the busiest in Sydney’s metropolitan network. Roy Howarth reports on a major renovation by Transport for NSW that is currently under way – the station’s first since 1983.

Managing & Mitigating SPADs: The Case of the Crooked Clock
Between 2012 and 2013, Dr Anjum Naweed led a research project at CQUniversity Australia looking at rail safety risk, specifically the effect of ‘SPAD’ (signal passed at danger) incidents. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to him that taking a leaf out of Sherlock Holmes’ book may prove useful in solving the mystery that lay behind so many of these events.