I would like to share some photo's of the old Burdekin Rail
bridge and the Haughton in flood. For those who have seen the Burdekin in true flood they will tell you what an amazing site it is. The River in these photo's has minimal run and it goes many, many metres above that old rail
bridge.
Even today the Haughton road
bridge on the Bruce highway is very narrow and has no handrails at all. Sitting on 100kph and anything happens you are in the drink.
They make a big deal of the Bruce being cut for a couple of days but when the old
old bridge across the Burdekin was in use it would be cut for weeks.
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Patsy Adam-Smith’s book on Railwaymen has some incredible stories of the old low level Burdekin
bridge and trains and lives lost. Long before Weather Bureau was in its present form, when communication was “telephone telegraph and errrr write a letter” , Railway staff either side of this
bridge would regularly ring various properties upstream to make a guess on when the
bridge would cut and trains would need to halt. Once the
bridge cut often trains would be sent
Rockhampton-
Longreach-
Winton-
Hughenden-
Townsville...if you can even start to comprehend a detour like that...
Apparently the theory was by making it comparatively low flood
debris would wash over rather than into the
bridge and minimise damage. Some tim es for all the best predictions of staff a train would come to grief on the
bridge- sticks would wash down and lodge in brake gear and lock the train up on the
bridge with rising waters all around etc etc- been quite a few lives lost I think as trains have been overwhelmed by flood waters on the
bridge at various tim es.
Don’t know whether it was the incident shown here but a cattle train washed off once when floating
debris snagged the brakes and locked the train up on the
bridge- at least one guy drowned and one guy who couldn’t swim saved himself by grabbing the tail of a beast and using the beast to get him to dry land...
Have a good one,
RA.