A pause for station identification

Queensland Rail recently extended to the Far North its popular tilt-train service. The Bug's travel editor BILL 'BOOM' GATES travelled on the inaugural service from Cairns to Brisbane and filed this report.

This self-confessed train tragic didn't like the new tilt train one bit! There were plenty of bits to like, mind, but the bit I didn't like was the death of one of our state's great railway stations, in Flinders Street Townsville.
A modern, sterile station has been built a few clicks north of the city, almost solely for the introduction of this 21st century icon of high-speed train travel and to give taxi drivers some cash as they take passengers back to where they wanted to go in the first place.
Gone, especially on the trip north, is that postcard-perfect opportunity for a picture as our state's long-distance trains slowly traversed that curved rail bridge over that mangrove-riddled tributary of Ross River and into that charming century-old station.
Gone, too, is the one big advantage train travel - slow, medium or tiltingly fast - should have over aircraft, and that's dropping you off right in the heart of your destination. If you're forced to get a taxi back to town, you may as well do it from the airport!
Some QR head honcho - I forget his name but someone on staff affectionately referred to him as "the smiling assassin" - explained why this was happening when I gave him a spray further down the line where the same thing has happened at Mackay.
It was a fact of life, he explained, that if the rail was ever going to provide a faster, more competitive service, a lot of those messy level crossings and other dangers associated with town centres had to be eliminated.
Explanation rejected, and weeks later I'm still steamed up about it. But I guess that era's gone too, along with all those memories of Flinders Street of decades ago with its quaint refreshment rooms, squat bottles of sarsaparilla and steel-wheeled wooden-slatted trollies on the platform and a little boy in boxer shorts horrified by a father who always disappeared into the station bar just when the Sunlander was due to take us home to Brisbane after summer holidays with the rels.
But it's partly because of all those memories that I have this special tip for Townsville. Burn down the depressing new station, send the trains back into that beautiful heritage-listed station in the city centre and make up the time somewhere else.
But where? Hmmm. How about by not having the train slow to a crawl from about 20km south of Stuart or 20km north of Garbutt. Trains, untilted or otherwise, still go through poor old Oonoonba so slowly that passengers could be forgiven for thinking there must be something worthwhile to see there. (Sorry, mum, for that slight on your birthplace!)
Go back to some of the other city stations too. Gympie had a beauty, from memory. Maryborough too.
So, where else could we save some time to make this all possible again?
Hmmm. Wait, here's an idea: seeing the tilt train is supposedly the world's fastest narrow-gauge express, how about somewhere between Cairns and Townsville getting the driver to open the throttle a bit?
Can you guess how far out of Cairns the train first hit the magical speed of 100km an hour, still a long way from its supposed top speed of around 170?
Was it on that flat stretch just south of Cairns after Gordonvale? Somewhere between Innisfail and Ingham. Nope, just 70km north of Townsville and quite some hours after leaving Cairns, the driver spotted a long straight stretch through that God-forsaken cattle and scrub country that's never going to be made into a resort.
He took some time about it, but finally wound our sleek tilt train up to a breathtaking, hair-raising, seat-crushing few clicks over the ton (a frightening 60mph in the old scale) before wisely throttling back to a far more acceptable speed for the long crawl into Bland Street station.