The railways in Queensland were the first major example of a mass employer in an industrial enterprise in our economy. It was until the middle part of the twentieth century the major singular employer of people in a single organisation. A slogan of the Queensland Railways was “A partner in Queensland’s Progress”. 

The Queensland Railway’s recruited heavily overseas from the British Isles, and Northern Europe in the period of the 1860s, and also acted as a source for employment for other migrant individuals and families in the following century or more. Those who built the Southern and Western Railway for instance were mainly drawn from the British Isles by Henry Jordan, the immigration agent employed by the Queensland government. They arrived on a series of vessels chartered to bring railway equipment and workers to the colony. As construction proceeded, employees would be sent to wherever the different stages of work required, or followed the railway works as they progressed. 

In the 1880’s some railway contractors in Queensland practised their own forms of reverse discrimination, such as O’Rourke and McSharry, on the Central Railway, where preference was given to Irish workers. In the 1880s during construction of the Barron Gorge railway the majority of workers were sourced from Ireland, or Italy. The Italian workers travelled to Queensland as a result of a special treaty between the Queensland and Italian governments. 

In the post Second World War period displaced persons, and migrants were sourced as workers for relaying projects on the Western, or Great Northern railway lines. In many areas of rural Queensland other immigrants would find temporary employment with railway work in various capacities. At the North Ipswich railway workshops special accommodation was constructed with the intention of housing migrant workers in the post war period, which was never to eventuate. 

One of the more recognisable examples of more recent times of the movement and identification of one particular cultural group with the railways was on the relaying work of the Mount Isa railway, or tracklaying in northern Queensland with groups such as Torres Strait lslanders becoming part of the railway “working” landscape.

An image that is still strongly promoted is that of the railway family. It is used in many cases to promote a cohesiveness, or wholeness of the railway as an identity. Generational employment was a product of the growth of the railway as an industry, and also as a social feature in Queensland. It was not uncommon for members of a family group to find differing grades of employment within the railway. 

It was also used as a form of social advancement and for provision of education for younger members of the family, to educate themselves up to what was considered a desirable professional class, or even in moving into a managerial stream within the railway. While this concept of generational employment is less of a factor within QR today, it is still used as a motivational idea, and still is used by many people to identify themselves as, a “railway family member”.