www.queenslandrail.com.au/RailServices/Traveltrain/Pages/TheSunlander.aspx
Travelling from Brisbane to Cairns ? You can fly & miss everything along the way. You can steal a car, squash yourself into a bus seat or catch a Train.
I went for the Sunlander Train & made some stops along the way. Trains are always better than a bus because you can get up & walk around. The Sunlander runs a regular service between Brisbane & Cairns - check out the time table on their website. The whole trip takes 31 hours so a few stops along the way are a good idea. I stopped at Airlie Beach for a few days & at Townsville for a couple of days. I had a pass for the whole trip & dropped into the Queensland Rail office at Roma Street Station to book the trip to Airlie Beach & then Townsville. The rest I booked along the way just by calling a toll free number.
The Sunlander leaves from the Roma Street station ( a short walk or taxi ride from most of the Brisbane CBD or you can get a local train to the same station - I jumped on at 9am on a Sunday. There is a checked luggage option with a 20kg limit. My bag was 22kg & the staff were cool ( unlike airlines that treat extra luggage as a criminal offence ) The Sunlander staff offered me a carry bag for the extra 2kg or told me I could store the bag on a rack in the carriage.
The seats are comfy & have lots of leg room for someone as tall as me + they recline. Another great thing about a train trip is you can see the countryside as you travel unlike a plane where you miss it all.
While there are no power points for a laptop, there is a dinning cart & a club cart to walk down to & hang out. They also have some movies on in the club cart.
If traveling during school holidays hope that Barry is working as he keeps the kids entertained when he comes thru checking tickets at each stop.
The food in the dinning cart was great, I went for a chicken burger for lunch & expected a microwave mess. What I got for was a great burger with fresh ingredients & cooked on a grill in the cart - YUM!!
For dinner I grabbed a pie in the club cart, once again - Yum!!
When traveling around Australia you are going to arrive in some places long before sun up. We got into Proserpine at 4:30am, in most parts of the world this means waiting until sun up for a local bus to town. So it was great that Queensland Rail had a bus waiting for us to take us down to Airlie Beach.
Had another entertaining bus driver/unofficial tour guide from Airlie Beach to Proserpine. When we go to the station the train was running late but the staff offered us a coffee & showed us the waiting room. Its an older station & the waiting room just had the feel of a bit of character that gets lost in modern buildings.
Over the road from the Proserpine station is a sugar mill that was in full swing at 7am + a sugar train was being loaded. As you head north from here there are just more & more fields of sugar cane being grown & processed. If you are lucky you will see a small sugar train running along the narrow gauge tracks to the mill with a long line of cane carriages in tow. The trip to Townsville passed quickly, if you are traveling all the way from Brisbane to Cairns it is nice to break up the trip with stops along the way on a hop on hop off pass.
Townsville station is modern platform on the edge of Townsville, you can see the old station further down the road on the way into town. There are taxis from the station for the short trip into town or down to the ferry for Magnetic Island. Just over the road also there is a bus stop for the local sunbus service that will take you into the CBD.
After a nice break on Magnetic Island & a night in Townsville I headed off for the last leg of the trip to Cairns. As you can see from the pics there is always a nice view out the window even with the clouds in the sky. Once again there was sugar cane as far as the eye can see. Also there were some very bare banana trees which explains why they are still $14 a kilo 6 months after the storms.
Its about 7 hours to Cairns & the time passed quickly. Before long we were arriving in Cairns where the station is part of a shopping mall complex at the town of the CBD. You can walk to most places in town or take a short taxi ride.
Overall a great way to travel & see Queensland, I recommend getting a pass & making a few stops along the way.
Also check out my review of the Tilt Train from Cairns to Brisbane
