The train journey on the India pacific from Perth to Adelaide is one of the great railway journeys of the world It is the only way to see the Nullarbor desert. This enormous plain is inaccessible by sealed road and even the Eyre highway from Perth to Adelaide only skirts the bottom of the Nullarbor Plain.
The journey starts at East Perth station which must be one of the ugliest buildings in the whole city. The full train is about 25 coaches with various grades of traveller – gold, red-sleeper and red non-sleeper. Gold is quite luxurious with two berth compartments and all meals provided while red-sleeper (ours) is quite comfortable but the sleeping accommodation is “compact" and you eat as you need to in the dining car. Non-sleeper tickets are much cheaper but it would be an ordeal to sleep in the seats for two nights that is best avoided if you can afford it.
[Actually the red sleeper is a miracle of modern engineering. It is amazing that it is possible to fit two full size bunks, two small lockers, a washbasin, storage rack into a space measuring two metres by 1.5 metres. Unfortunately they seemed to have forgotten that you also need to put people into that space as well. Luckily we are not too fat. ]
The Indian-Pacific in Perth
We leave at mid-day and the train trundles slowly along the Swan valley, which then becomes the Avon Valley as it rises up onto the ridge of the Darling Range east of Perth. You travel through wooded hillsides until you reach the plain at Northam where the landscape changes into wheatfields bounded by small shrubs and trees. These wheatfields were already harvested in some places but where you could see the full grown wheat it was surprisingly short and not very close packed. Compared with English wheat the yield must be tiny, but then there is so much land that it is no doubt still profitable.
We pass through several small 'towns' usually consisting of just a few homes and a grain storage depot where grain can be loaded onto the trains. The mountains of grain resemble the heaps of sand and gravel from the gravel beds near our home in Cirencester – created by conveyor belts with pointed tops. Road trains – trucks with two or three huge trailers – deliver the grain and are tipped up to ditch their load by the conveyors.
Meckering, Cunderlin, Tammin, Kellerberrin.... sometimes the train stops and we peer out of the window to see if we can identify the reason. Perhaps they are dropping off goods for the local community or we are waiting for the single track to clear ahead. The pace is very leisurely. We are tracking the Great Eastern Highway (a rather fancy name for an almost empty two-lane road) which we flirt with as it as it approaches the track and then moves away again. There is also the water pipe that was built around 1900 to supply water to the Goldfields at Kalgoorlie which doggedly hugs the road. This is a marvel of engineering carrying water 900km from a dam near Perth to a desert town, but without it Kalgoolie would not exist
The Kalgoolie pipeline
As we press on eastwards the landscape slowly changes and the wheat looks even shorter and more sparse. There is more scrub land and soon it is mainly small shrubs and small trees that dominate. By the time we reach Southern Cross - a tiny settlement but with big letters on the map – there is little evidence of farming of any sort.
Southern Cross
Although it is drier here we have been chasing some rain all journey and we finally catch up with it at this point. The track turns north away from the highway and passes through huge salt lakes, some of which are completely empty.
Salt lake in the distance
Salinity is a big problem in Australia. We have seen lakes like these close up and you can find huge salt crystals on the edges. After a while the direction resumes eastward towards Kalgoorlie
The place names on the map seem to have no physical counterparts – or if they do they are too small to recognise. Koolyanobbing, Darrine, Jourdi, Walleroo ... It begins to get dark and there is no light other than the setting sun and eventually we cannot see outside the train at all. At 9:50 we arrive in Kalgoorlie – a real frontier town that we remember well from a previous visit. It is still a major gold mining town with truck-loads of miners arriving on a Saturday night to spend their pay. There is a scheduled 3-hour stop here so we rush off to see if we can find somewhere that will still serve us a meal. Nearly everywhere is shut except for a couple of noisy pubs which we think we should avoid, but finally we find a pace that is open 24 hours and manage to fill our stomachs. Just as we leave the rain has caught up with us and there is a torrential downpour. The town has large storm drains, but the downpour is so voluminous that even these are overflowing. We try to wait it out under shelter but eventually we have to make a dash for the train and arrive soaked through. It is all rather ironic in a desert town short of water.
The next morning we wake up to see the Nullarbor under a dull, cloudy sky. There s no growth more than a couple of feet high and as we progress even these small shrubs gradually disappear. The land is completely flat with lots of stones sitting on the red sand and some very small shrubs. It is just wonderful. Emptiness for hundreds of kilometers in all directions (well only about 100km south before you reach the coast). There are no springs, lakes, streams rivers – no open water – in the Nullarbor; no trees, no shelter of any kind. And yet up until the railway was built, Aboriginal tries lived here.
In the middle of all this we stop at a 'station' at Forrest. This is an airstrip in the middle of nowhere at which large jet aircraft can land if they get into difficulties – it is the largest runway in Australia outside the major cities. The airstrip also serves as a refuelling point for light aircraft and is manned by two people. We stop to deliver their post.
This stretch of railway track is the longest straight track in the world. No curves, no cuttings, no bridges or tunnels, for 478km. We wonder why it is not smooth! The train bumps around like the old British Rail trains of our youth. But the railway was built by a British engineer of the same vintage so that might explain it.
Nurina Station - the view was the same on the other side of the track
The big event of the day is a one hour stop in Cook.
The locomotive at Cook
This was, until 1997, a small settlement of a couple of dozen houses including a school, swimming pool and a hospital. When the railways were privatised circumstances changed and the number of inhabitants has since dropped to four. There is a sign saying 'Save our hospital – get sick”. We emerge from the air-conditioned train into a dry heat of 32 degrees with completely the wrong clothing. Why the train is so cold I have not yet worked out but it has been the same on many other trains that we have travelled on. A strong wind is blowing the dust around and dried shrubs tumble around.
The children's playground at Cook
Whilst this train is not as sociable as some of the others we have been on, we still manage to meet people and listen to their various stories. There is Alex, aged 85 who explains the benefits of internet dating, except that the last woman he met died about a month after they went on holiday together; there is a young Finnish man who explains how he has done one degree in Finland but did not graduate so that he could do another degree in Perth, but not graduate so that he can commence a third degree in Edinburgh. We meet a couple from Yorkshire who have decided that reclining seats were not such a good bargain after all. Jeff manages to bore a couple of passengers by talking about global warming. We then catch up with the rain again and have the strange experience of seeing the Nullarbor covered in puddles.
The train's PA system congratulates us on having completed our traverse of the Nullarbor. Perhaps we will get a certificate. Despite having crossed the Nullarbor there is still another eighteen hour (i.e. another night of trying to get undressed in the smallest space imaginable – surely smaller than the NASA astronauts have to manage with) before we get to Adelaide.
After we emerge from the Nullarbor we see, on the north side of the track, the signs for the Woomera atomic bomb test site. This area is still radio-active but its OK because they put up warning signs every now and then to keep people out. (I'm not sure how the wildlife read these signs.)
Woomera - you can see the warning sign in the distance
We finally arrive in Adelaide - with the rain.
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