The Selwyn branch came first, begun in 1909 and running about fifty kilometres south from Cloncurry to Malbon, with sidings dropped along the way at Dolomite, Marimo, Mitakoodi, and Marraba. An extension reached the Mount Elliott mine at Selwyn on 15 December 1910, beneath the range named for Alfred Selwyn, director of the Geological Survey of Victoria. The arithmetic of the line was simple: smelted copper rolled east, coking coal returned west, and cattle and coke rode the gaps between. It was a railway built on a commodity, and when the price of copper collapsed and the Mount Elliott and Hampden smelters closed in 1919 and 1920, the branch's first reason for existing died with them.

The Dajarra branch carried bigger ambitions. Running south-west from Malbon, it was meant to do two things at once: tap fresh copper at the Duchess mine, where ore had been found in 1897, and serve as one link in a sweeping dream of inland rail joining Sydney to Darwin. Construction crept outward, opening to Duchess on 21 October 1912, reaching the crossing of the Wills River in 1915, and finally arriving at Carbine Creek, renamed Dajarra, on 16 April 1917. Beyond Dajarra, crews even began grading toward Camooweal. Then the work simply stopped. The transcontinental railway remained a line on a map, and Dajarra became not a through-station to the north but the end of the track.

Being the end of the line turned out to be the making of the place. As the copper traffic withered, a different freight took over. Dajarra sat at the natural meeting point of vast pastoral runs, and stockmen began driving mobs overland to load them onto trains bound for the meatworks of the east coast. The scale became legendary. Drovers brought cattle on horseback from hundreds of kilometres away, some from across the Western Australian border, and old hands swore the yards moved more cattle than Texas did. For decades a weekly mixed train rattled down from Cloncurry, and a remote siding in the spinifex quietly grew into one of the largest cattle railheads on Earth.

What the railway gave, the road eventually took. Road trains, faster and more flexible than a weekly mixed service, slowly captured the cattle trade that had kept Dajarra alive. The last train pulled out of Dajarra in 1988, and the line from Duchess closed for good on 1 January 1994. The great inland link to Darwin was never built, though the idea refuses to die entirely, resurfacing in modern proposals to connect Mount Isa and Camooweal to the Adelaide-Darwin railway. Out at Dajarra today, the skeleton of those enormous stockyards still stands in the dust, an outline of a boom that copper started and cattle made famous.