In the beginning, everything came from Britain. The construction contract went to the famous firm of Peto, Brassey and Betts; the rails, the first locomotives, even two complete prefabricated 'erecting shops' with cast-iron frames were loaded onto ships in England, sailed to Brisbane, and carried the last stretch upriver to Ipswich by paddle steamer. The first section of line opened in 1865, and that same year the workshops turned out their first piece of rolling stock - a single engine truck. Ten wagons followed in 1866. It was modest, imported, dependent. But the men working the floor were learning, and they were impatient to build for themselves.

In 1877 they did it. The workshops assembled their first locomotive, an A10 class cobbled largely from existing spare parts - proof that Queensland could make its own engines rather than buy them. From that first machine the floodgates opened. Over the decades that followed, North Ipswich built 218 steam locomotives in all, the last of them a DD17 class rolled out in 1952. Around the turn of the century the cramped early sheds gave way to a grand vision: under engineer William Nisbet, the site was rebuilt at scale, with a 1902 power house that lit the whole complex sixteen years before mains electricity reached Ipswich itself, and a great traverser to shuttle locomotives between the rows of soaring brick shops.

In December 1919, a battered Vickers Vimy biplane sat stranded near Charleville in the Queensland outback. Aboard it were Ross and Keith Smith, who had just completed the first flight from England to Australia by an Australian crew - and now their machine had broken down, far from any aircraft factory. The job came to the railway men of North Ipswich. With no drawings or patterns to work from, they reverse-engineered the broken parts by eye: forging and machining new connecting rods, repairing the cracked crankcase, and carving an entirely new propeller from Queensland maple. Engine men who built steam locomotives sent a record-setting aeroplane back into the sky.

The workshops were never only machinery; they were a society. For most of their history they employed more than 1,500 people at a time, peaking above 3,000 just after the Second World War - making them one of the great engines of Ipswich life, woven through thousands of families across generations. The men planted gardens and built lunch shelters between the sheds, personalising the soot-stained yard; in the Bogie and Brake Shop their chalked notes still mark the old timber lockers. In the First World War some 300 of the 1,600 workers turned to munitions, forging shell casings from Australian steel; in the Second, the floor produced a special Tool and Gauge Shop, one of only two of its kind in the country, along with the largest casting ever poured here - thirty tons of metal in 1942. Today the front third of the site is The Workshops Rail Museum, run by the Queensland Museum - while behind it, Queensland Rail's tradespeople still work, as they have without pause since 1864.