Every time I look up a map of my town on Google maps, I find these "stations" all over the place. Little train station logos, with official sounding names like "Wulguru Station" and "Currajong Station", implying that you could go to that point on the map and find a train station, from which you would be able to catch a train.
Perhaps this was true, once, many long decades before I was born. I can't say for sure. All I know is that there hasn't been a train station in the vast majority of these locations for as long as I've been alive - and most of these areas don't even show signs of form work to suggest that there might have been train stations there once... in the long distant past.
I wrote an article on the vanishing train lines of North West Tasmania a few years back for Australian Coast and Country magazine, so I'm reasonably good at picking up the signs that a train line or a platform once existed in a location. It has to be gone for a number of decades before you loose all sign of it.
This means that one of three things is happening here:
If any one of these things are happening (and surely one of them must), it indicates that Google cannot be trusted to provide accurate landmarks. Given the fact that they haven't actually listed the one train station that is in existence in Townsville, and they show a number of train lines that definitely don't exist, I think this might be a fairly safe assumption.
Oh, something else I noticed the other day that I thought was particularly amusing was the fact that the Dalrymple Gap Road turns up on Google maps. That "road" has been abandoned for well over 60 years and has long since returned to the wild. It's now a popular half-day-walk amongst bush walkers in the area.
Where is Google getting it's information from?
And why do I still look at Google maps if I want to get directions?
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