It was meant to go to Cloncurry. When a railway from Normanton was first debated in the 1880s, the goal was to link the port with the copper country and, eventually, with Townsville's Great Northern line. Then in late 1885 came the gold strike at Belmore Station, and within two years the Croydon field held six thousand people clamouring for supplies no road could carry. Plans changed. The line was diverted east to Croydon instead, reaching it in July 1891. But the link to Cloncurry never came, and neither did the connection to the rest of Queensland's network. The Normanton to Croydon railway was left exactly as it began: an island of track, connected to no other line in the country, running its own isolated world between two Gulf towns.

The man who made it work was George Phillips, who had helped survey the very ground the town stood on back in 1867. Phillips knew the Gulf's two great enemies - seasonal floods that washed out ordinary embankments, and termites that devoured timber sleepers from below. In 1884 he patented an answer: special U-shaped steel sleepers laid directly on the bare ground, with no ballast to scour away. The genius was that the line could simply go underwater. When the wet season came, floods rolled over the track and then receded, leaving it ready for service almost at once, while the roads stayed impassable for weeks. The steel ignored the termites entirely. More expensive to buy than timber, it proved cheaper to lay and to maintain - and it has lasted, remarkably, into the present day.

Phillips supervised the construction and shaped the buildings too, with designs drawn up under his direction by departmental draftsman James Gartside. At its peak the terminus was a small town in itself: a station building holding the telegraph office, the station master's and traffic manager's offices, a booking office, waiting and parcels rooms, even a ladies' room with its own ramp. Because the line was cut off from everywhere, it had to be self-sufficient, with a goods shed, a maintenance store, fitting and blacksmith's shops, an engine shed and a gantry. Much of that working machinery has gone, leaving footings and inspection pits in the grass, but the heart survives. The cast-iron columns of the carriage shade were cast at the Toowoomba Foundry - the same works that supplied some of the railway's steel sleepers - so the building and the track it shelters were, in a sense, forged together.

The goldfield faded after the First World War, and traffic on the line dwindled, but the railway refused to die. Supplying enough water for steam engines had always been a struggle this far out, so railmotors took over: a Panhard was tried in 1922, and by 1929 steam was abandoned altogether. The track's flood-proof reliability kept it open as a lifeline long after the gold was gone, a vital link through the wet when nothing else could move. In 1982 a 1950-built railmotor, RM93, was restored and transferred to Normanton; by 1987 it carried the name Gulflander on its sides and set running its now-famous weekly schedule - up to Croydon on Wednesdays, home on Thursdays. It still runs today, the oldest railmotor on the line, carrying tourists across the same submerged steel that George Phillips dreamed up nearly a century and a half ago. The line that 'goes from nowhere to nowhere,' as locals proudly put it, has outlasted them all.