When I got off the train at this station it made me think of Simla, a hill station in the Himalayan foothills, where, during the colonial days when India was a British Crown Colony, British soldiers serving in India sent their families to Simla for the summer to avoid the brutal heat of the plains of the subcontinent. Kuranda is billed as the town in the rain forest, 1,000-ft above the coastal plains, not far away. Kuranda was surveyed in 1888 in anticipation of development that would arrive with the railway. The current rail station was designed in 1910 and construction began 1n 1913. Kuranda is one of the earliest stations to be built in Australia using standard concrete units and is the oldest remaining example of its type in Queensland. It was designed after the style of a Swiss Chalet, the idea being to make Kuranda a show station. Ornamental planting proposed in the 1910 scheme, was developed by George Wriede and Bert Wickham, both station masters at Kuranda. Kuranda station first won the Northern Division of the Annual Garden Competition in 1915 and was often the winner in subsequent years that it became folklore that Kuranda won every year. This picture was taken on 15 December 2011, Sig...