Back on the train again!

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The Indian Pacific: Adelaide to Perth

This leg of the trip saw the train leaving Adelaide around 6pm on Sunday night and pulling into East Perth station at 9am on Tuesday morning. Yes, 2 nights on the train - it was a long journey!

There were no CWA ladies on the train to keep us amused this time! I was sitting next to Martin from Holland who has just finished his mechanical engineering degree and had been to Adelaide to visit some friends he’d made whilst he had studied there for a few months as part of an exchange programme with his university. After we arrived in Perth, he was picking up a car and driving up to Broome.

I also met a girl who was in the process of moving to Bunbury, a town south of Perth, so she has her life packed up in her car and the car on the transport wagon attached to the train.

As we travelled along on the train there wasn’t a huge amount to look at - it looked much the same every time I looked out the window! Lots of red dirt everywhere and every so often a bit of salt bush.

All my days and nights are a bit mixed up, but at some point we stopped at Cook, to take on fuel and water and to change drivers. This gave us enough time for a wander around the town. In years gone by, this was a thriving railway town, but when it was decided that they really only needed the stop for refuelling and as accommodation for train drivers, the town all but shut down - now there is a permanent population of about 5 people I think, and they are there to refuel the trains. That must be quite a lonely existence.

Cook is on the Nullarbor Plain, which means the treeless plain, and it certainly lives up to that name, not a tree in sight. The Nullarbor also has the longest straight stretch of railway track in the world, but I forget just now how long it is without a bend, anyway, it’s long!

What else; we stopped briefly somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and we were met by the postie who picked up the mail for some towns that must have been nearby (well, relatively nearby, there was nothing in sight as far as the eye could see in any direction!)

On our second night, we reached Kalgoorlie, and we had a couple of hours here to visit the town. I had booked myself onto the whistle stop tour the train people organise. We toured around the town and the guide told us lots of stories about the history, and how the town was founded by 3 Irishmen who had literally stumbled over gold. They were walking along one day, after there had been rains, and at the bottom of a slope, near a tree they saw some flecks of gold. Apparently, the last thing you do when you spot gold, is bend down to pick it up as that draws too much attention to you, so they covered it over with some tree branches until the next morning when they were waiting for the office to open so that they could stake their claim. We visited the Superpit which is Australia’s largest open cut mine; it operates 24 hours a day, so there were floodlights on and we could see a little of what was going on, although they were so far away they looked like they were driving Tonka Trucks!! Around the parking area, there were different bits of kit they had used in the mine; the size of some of these things was just staggering, and the value of them - around AU$50,000 (around £25,000) for one tyre for the dumper truck - I’ve forgotten how much she said the truck was worth, but I’m sure it was into the millions of dollars.

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