The ghost station of Many Peaks is enclosed in a jumble of rocky and timbered hills. There is not much else to Littlemore now than a farmhouse and a sign.
These sleepy and forgotten places in the Boyne Valley of central Queensland were once linked by hundreds of kilometres of train lines that swept an inland arc between the ports of Maryborough and Gladstone. Now, sections of those tracks are being gradually retrofitted for slower forms of transport: the foot, the horse and the bicycle.
Restoring the entire proposed 271km Boyne Burnett Inland Rail Trail from Taragoola to Gayndah will be a long journey – if completed, it would be the longest such track in the southern hemisphere.
But for retired farmer Mick Colyer, it is an undertaking that could save the Boyne Valley through which he first mustered cattle as a young bloke.
“When those railroads closed, so many people got displaced, there was no work,” the rail trail committee member says. “The little country towns basically died.
“So to try to get people out into those little country areas, to try to put some money into the businesses at those townships that used to be thriving little communities … right from the start, that’s been our vision.”
It is a vision that would require a dramatic U-turn of prevailing trends.
The 2006 census counted 646 people in the Boyne Valley. In 2011, that count fell to 379. By 2013, the Australian Bureau of Statistics no longer considered the four surviving settlements of the Boyne Valley as “urban centres and localities” – or towns – due to their dwindling populations.
Then, in 2020, the valley’s only pub turned off its taps.
But there are already signs that the promise of the rail trail may have begun to gather steam.
After years of community meetings, the first section of redeveloped track officially opened on late 2021. Running about 26km from an abandoned railway siding in the Kalpowar forest called Barrimoon, it descends the Dawes Range through six tunnels and passes Many Peaks to the village of Builyan.
A year later, a second section of trail opened, south of the Boyne Valley along the banks of the Burnett River. This runs about 30km from Mundubbera to Mt Debateable, an abandoned rail siding near Gayndah. Both towns dispute the title “citrus capital of Queensland” – to which Gayndah stakes its claim in the form of a Big Orange and Mundubbera with a Big Mandarin. Between these two landmarks, a rail trail now winds through citrus groves, past broad sweeps of the Burnett and the abandoned timber rail bridges that cross its tributaries.
The first triumph of those sections of the new trail came last December, when the Grand Hotel Many Peaks threw open its doors again under new management.
After eight years on the Gladstone regional council and having played a pivotal role in setting up the community group that runs the rail trail, Desley O’Grady and her husband, Craig, moved to Many Peaks, bought the historic pub that backs on to its old train line and issued a call out for volunteers to help clean it up.
O’Grady says the turnout of more than 40 folk was testament to how sorely valley locals missed their meeting place. But she knows she will need more than their support to keep its doors open.
“There’s only 25 people who actually live in Many Peaks itself,” O’Grady says. “So we know we’re a tourism destination hotel.”
And one of the biggest drawcards in the Boyne Valley, she says, is the rail trail.
“The reason why we bought the hotel is that over the last 12 years we’ve been going to different rail trails, seeing what happened in different states and different towns,” the publican says. “Cycling tourism is the next big thing, I think.”
That conviction appears to be paying off. Last Sunday, O’Grady says, the Grand hotel served 180 meals. Many were bike riders.
But significant challenges lie ahead for the Boyne Burnett initiative. There is the sheer distances involved, the amount of work required to make the bumpy and sandy section rideable, its gullies crossable. There is the fact that all this work is driven by volunteers scattered across sparsely populated areas.
And not all the Boyne Valley’s business community is sold on the rail trail.
Hugh Harvey runs what he argues is the only other operating business in that valley’s hospitality and retail sector – a general store in the town of Ubobo, which has a population of about 20. Along with fuel, groceries and hardware, Harvey sells stubby coolers with the slogan: “I’m a hobo from Ubobo.”
Though yet to be officially opened, the trail past Ubobo has been graded and Harvey has noticed a few bike riders pedal past his store of late.
But he has “no interest at all” in the trail that passes within metres of his business of nearly two decades.
“Over the years we’ve had a lot of different groups out here – and you can categorise your groups into money spenders and tight-arses,” Harvey says. “The bushwalkers, push-bike riders, birdwatchers, horse riding groups … at the end of the day, they aren’t money spenders.”
While some on the ground might be yet to be convinced, Griffith University’s Brent Moyle says other rail trails have proved “a shot in the arm for country towns” around Australia by providing “steady, reliable tourism”.
Further south, the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail was completed in 2018 and is credited with a boom in accommodation, the revitalisation of country pubs and the creation of jobs.
A professor in tourism with a focus on regenerating remote communities, Moyle acknowledges that the Boyne Burnett is “unlikely to draw Brisbane Valley-level crowds overnight”. But, he says, it could “carve out a loyal niche of cyclists, hikers and caravanners chasing authentic rural experiences”.
“We’ve only scratched the surface of rail trails in Australia,” Moyle says.
And for Colyer, the rail trail is not all about economics. Yes, the old cattleman volunteers his time and energy to a cause he hopes will bring money back into the Boyne Valley. But he also does it on principle.
“This is an asset owned by the public,” Colyer says of the trail. “And that’s what we’ve all been about all along too: just to have an asset, owned by the people, that people can use.”
And though Colyer is not sure the vision of Australia’s longest rail trail will be realised in his lifetime, there is already a new set of pioneering cyclists making the most of that asset.
To mark the opening of the Barrimoon tunnels section of the trail in 2021, Andrew Demack of peak advocacy group Bicycle Queensland rode more than 680km over nine days, linking the Boyne Burnett with two other rail trails, via a string of back roads and a few main ones, from Ipswich to Gladstone.
The trip required planning and experience, he says – but it proved that bike trails could one day cover such sprawling journeys.
“Well, it is ambitious, but it’s certainly a dream that Bicycle Queensland subscribes to,” he says.
In the meantime, though, Demack says there is already a growing network of “great recreational trails”. And the Barrimoon to Builyan section of the Boyne Burnett, with its views of rainforest-clad peaks and valleys of grass trees, gums and rolling paddocks, he says, is “particularly superb”.
“It’s one of the most spectacular little bits of rail trail that we’ve got in Queensland.”
