The railway was never meant to come to Croydon at all. In the mid-1880s Queensland planned a line inland from the port of Normanton toward Cloncurry and its copper, eventually to meet the Townsville railway and tie the north together. Then, in November 1885, a major gold strike was reported at Belmore Station, 145 kilometres east of Normanton, and the calculus changed overnight. By the end of 1886 the Croydon field held two thousand people and was climbing fast, and getting goods to that booming, isolated field suddenly mattered more than the link to Cloncurry. The government diverted the line. Tenders were called in 1887, construction crept east section by section, and the rails finally reached Croydon in July 1891 - by which time the wildest days of the rush were already passing.

George Phillips knew this country before there was a railway in it. He had surveyed the site of Normanton in the 1860s, later represented Carpentaria in the Queensland parliament, and designed and supervised the building of the line he had argued for. His submersible track was a genuine piece of frontier ingenuity. The steel sleepers were cast at a foundry in Brisbane's Woolloongabba and as far away as Glasgow, and keeping enough of them on hand was a constant headache - timber had to fill the gaps on some sections while supplies caught up. But the idea worked. More than a century on, the Normanton-to-Croydon line is the last isolated section of the Queensland railways still in use, and the only full-length line ever built on the Phillips patent sleeper system that is still working as he intended.

For a few short years the line carried the life of a goldfield: mail and passengers, building materials, firewood for the mine boilers, and weekend excursion trains that ran picnics out to the waterholes and races at Golden Gate. A suburban service between Croydon and the satellite town of Golden Gate even started in 1902. It did not last. The Croydon field never sustained its first success; output slumped in the early 1900s, and after the First World War it was plain the field would not recover. The railway turned a profit only between 1898 and 1902. It survived anyway, kept open as a community lifeline because the Phillips track bounced back from floods when nothing else could. By 1929 steam was gone, replaced by economical railmotors, and the line settled into a long, slow afterlife.

The original station did not survive - a storm destroyed it in 1969, and the site was left with a plain corrugated-iron shed for decades before a new station building was constructed in 2005, designed to resemble the original. But the yard around it is a working museum of a frontier railway. There is a set of Avery scales against the wall, an 1887 Saxby and Farmer signal lever believed to be rare, a Ransomes and Rapier crane beside the line, a loading ramp built of metal sleepers and earth, and the rail-built tower of an old windmill standing in the yards with locomotive parts scattered around it. Since 1978 the surviving railmotor has run as the Gulflander, a tourist service that makes a weekly amble between Normanton and Croydon - and, in the wet season, still hauls freight when the roads are cut, doing the one job this peculiar line was always best at.