to the town, early residents acquired land nearby. Once the railway line was in operation the centre of the town was relocated to its present position. The railway was closed in 1961. The modern day Pacific Motorway largely follows the route of the former railway. The new Gold Coast railway opened on a different alignment from Brisbane to neighbouring Robina in 1998. Robina station is about further than the old Mudgeeraba railway station. In the early 1930s during the Great Depression, the Upper Mudgeeraba Creek banks were the location of unemployment relief camps set up under the Income (Unemployment Relief) Tax Acts, 1930. The creek water helped sustain vegetable gardens for the residents, housed in timber and corrugated iron huts. One aspect of the relief scheme put in place by the Queensland Government was to establish small banana plantations. In Upper Mudgeeraba, divided into 50 blocks were made available to successful applicants to farm. Mudgeeraba Special School opened on 1 January 1981. Somerset College opened in 1983. Mudgeeraba Creek State School opened on 29 January 1996. Following the closure of All Saints' Anglican Church in the Chirn Park neighbourhood in Southport on 2 November 1997, the church building was relocated to become the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd at 4 Tarrant Drive, Mudgeeraba. The Gold Coast City Council opened a public library at the Old Post Office Heritage Centre in Railway Street in 2004. However it did not attract a lot of patronage and it was decided to merge it into the Robina Library with the Mudgeeraba branch closing on 25 January 2017. The Gold Coast City Council operates a fortnightly mobile library service which visits Railway Street beside Mudgeeraba Pool. At the , the suburb recorded a population of 13,204, 51.3% female and 48.7% male. The median age of the Mudgeeraba population was 36 years, 1 year below the national median of 37. 69% of people living in Mudgeeraba were born in Australia. The other top responses for country of birth were New Zealand 8.5%, England 6.1%, South Africa 1.7%, Scotland 0.7%, Germany 0.7%. 88.7% of people spoke only English at home; the next most common languages were 0.7% Japanese, 0.6% German, 0.6% Mandarin, 0.4% Cantonese, 0.4% Spanish. In the , Mudgeeraba had a population of 13,624 people. Heritage listings Mudgeeraba has a number of heritage-listed sites, including: Franklin Drive (crossing Mudgeeraba Creek): Dip Crossing Bridge (Old Mudgeeraba