The Kuranda railway, and the rainforest above Cairns

Behind Cairns, the land rises like a wall. The coastal plain is narrow, a strip of sugar cane, mangroves and suburbs, and then the ranges climb steeply into thick rainforest, with the tableland on top. In the 1880s that wall stood between the tin miners of the tableland and the sea, and Queensland decided to put a railway up it.

The result, the line from Cairns to Kuranda, was a formidable piece of railway building. Gangs of men, working largely by hand with picks, shovels and explosives, cut a ledge up the side of the Barron Gorge between 1887 and 1891, digging fifteen tunnels and throwing bridges across the ravines. Many of them died in the attempt. The line reached Kuranda in June 1891, and it has carried passengers ever since, long after the mining that justified it faded. Today the Kuranda Scenic Railway is run for visitors, with heritage carriages and a slow timetable, and it is the best way to understand the landscape behind the city.

Up the gorge

The train leaves Cairns across the flat cane country, and then the climb begins. The line twists back and forth along the slope, in and out of tunnels, with the views opening and closing on the right and left: down to the coast and the Coral Sea, across to the forested ridges, and into gullies full of tree ferns and palms.

The set piece is Stoney Creek. The line crosses the gorge on a curving iron bridge on three trestle piers, right beside a waterfall, and the train slows so that passengers can look straight down the falls to the pool below. Further up, the line reaches the station at Barron Falls, where it stops to let everyone out onto a platform facing the main falls across the gorge. How much water you see depends on the season. In the wet, from about December to March, the Barron thunders over the rocks in a white wall of spray; in the dry, much of the river is held back by a weir upstream, and the falls can be a thin trickle down bare rock.

Kuranda and the cableway

Kuranda itself is a small village in the rainforest at the top of the line, known for its markets, cafés and the long avenue of fig trees down its main street. It has its own small station, much photographed for its ferns and flowers, and a range of wildlife parks and walks.

Most visitors take the train one way and come back by the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, which runs for about 7.5 kilometres from Kuranda back down to the coastal plain on the edge of Cairns, skimming over the canopy and stopping at stations along the way where boardwalks lead into the forest. Seen from above, the rainforest makes sense: you look down on the crowns of the trees, and on the climbing plants and epiphytes that live in them. The forest here is part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Site, which stretches for hundreds of kilometres along the coast.

Tours that stop in Cairns

None of the tours here lists Kuranda among its stops, but all three spend time in Cairns, where the railway starts, and the trip up the line is the obvious use of a free day there.

Travelsphere's twenty-one-night Highlights of Australia takes in Melbourne, Sydney, Uluru and Alice Springs, Darwin, Kakadu National Park and Katherine, then Cairns and Brisbane.

Its forty-four-night Highlights of Australia with New Zealand and Cook Islands Add-on follows a similar route, with the Great Barrier Reef as well as Cairns, and continues to Auckland and Paihia in New Zealand.

Just You's twenty-two-night Australian Highlights, for solo travellers, runs from Sydney up the coast by way of Port Stephens, Port Macquarie, Byron Bay and Brisbane to Cairns, then to Uluru and Alice Springs, and on to Adelaide, the Barossa Valley, Hahndorf and Warrnambool.

If the falls matter to you, go in the wet season and expect showers. Take the train up and the cableway down, and be ready to move from one side of the carriage to the other: as the line winds, the best views change sides.