Rockhampton Mail (train)
The overnight Rockhampton Mail train began operating in 1904, following the completion of the rail link between Gladstone and Rockhampton. Initially, the service was available three times a week, but its popularity led to a six-day-a-week schedule within a decade.
Although Brisbane and Gladstone had been connected by rail since 1897, Rockhampton's civic leaders had resisted a direct connection to Gladstone, fearing that traffic would be drawn away from the city's port if goods from the hinterland could be carried to a better port. As a result, passengers travelling to and from Brisbane had to travel by coastal seamer for at least part of the journey. Overnight steamer services between Rockhampton and Gladstone continued until the rail link was completed in December 1903, reducing the trip from Brisbane to eighteen hours.
By 1925, when the 'Rocky Mail' was involved in Queensland's worst rail disaster, the service usually carried between two hundred and three hundred passengers on a dozen carriages (hauled by two steam locomotives. With three first-class sleepers, a second-class sleeper, two first-class carriages, and two second-class carriages, a composite carriage with first- and second-class compartments, a goods waggon, and a brake van, one might have thought this was a passenger train— and in a way it was — but the critical element in the train's moniker came in the twelfth carriage — a travelling post office. Mail from Brisbane post offices could be loaded onto the train, sorted en route and dropped off at the various stations along the way.
At least, that was how it was until Travelling Post Offices were withdrawn from the line to Cairns in 1930 as an economic measure. Although the carriages were gone, the services continued to be called Mail Trains until the last service (the Dirranbandi Mail) was terminated in 1993.
