To get started on another around-the-world tour, I thought I would do what I did last time and explore parts of Australia that I haven’t had the chance to visit yet. Because I’ve seen so much in the west I thought I would take a different tack from driving or flying and catch the Indian Pacific train from Perth to Adelaide with my car on-board. A lot people I know have always been interested in seeing what it would be like to ride the train over 43 hours through some of the least populated deserts in Australia.
I chose to take a cheap sleeper seat to save a few bucks and see how tolerable it would be. The trip turned out to really be great and a lot more interesting than you would think for rolling through endless views with flat surfaces and no trees (via the Nullarbor Plain). The trip was really quite comfortable – even for us spendthrifts. There were 50 of us riding the cheap way (from very young to very old) and we had one train carriage for doing whatever we wanted (sleeping, eating, relaxing, socializing) and two other cars with some restrictions on what we could do there. One of the other cars was a lounge and the other a diner. Sleeping was not permitted outside of our main carriage and only their food could be consumed in the dining car. Otherwise, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted in our 3 cars and had quite a bit of room to spread out. The lounge car was only available for an additional fee of $15 for the trip. For some reason this put off most of the passengers I was riding with – which resulted in me and about 7 other people having the whole place to ourselves. It had big comfortable seating and plenty of windows to view out through.
The food was really quite good and only about $13 a meal. I had a very nice Thai Chicken Curry the first night and a nice homemade Chicken Pie meal the second night. They cooked up Big Aussie Breakfast for the morning and had a range of sandwiches and snacks that could be purchased all day. The pricing was comparable to what you would normally pay anywhere (or even possibly cheaper).
The train was huge and contained 37 carriages overall (including 2 carriages full of automobiles in the back – including mine). This may have had something to do with “The Christmas Train” event having happened on the last trip out to Perth a week earlier or it may just be the norm. Aside from our cheap “red” class there were gold and platinum classes with formal dining cars and proper sleeping quarters. Now that I have had the chance to ride overnight trains in proper beds vs seats, I have no regrets about the red service they were offering. I could never sleep that well on the trains in Thailand and Egypt due to constant irregular motion of the train rocking the beds, but these Indian Pacific sleeper seats could be reclined to almost completely flat and had tons of leg room. I actually slept quite well in them once I figured out how to get on my side. I think perhaps we have all slept in cars while growing up and might somehow find seats more natural to sleep in when motion is a constant factor.
The train runs over 2500 kilometers between Perth and Adelaide, but continues on to Sydney – connecting the Indian Ocean with the Pacific Ocean. Before we arrived in Kalgoorlie for our first stop the train needed to pull over and allow freight trains and smaller passenger trains pass through from time to time. Once we got past Kalgoorlie there were minimal interruptions and a steady progression at about 115kph (according to my trusty GPS watch). For one (almost) 500km stretch the train travels down a perfection straight stretch with no bends at all in the track.
Unlike the road that runs across the bottom of the continent, the Indian Pacific route rides about 150km north through the heart of the Nullarbor Plain. While traveling from Perth to Adelaide the train needs to stop 3-4 times to deliver mail to people who live in the Western Australia parts these very remote areas. When traveling through the South Australia section of the trip it stops to pick up mail from a few places. When traveling west the train drops mail in South Australia and picks up mail in Western Australia. Each mail drop represents about 35 people sprawled out across hundreds of square kilometers. In addition to mail, the Indian Pacific is also used to pick up people from these remote regions so they can visit doctors in major cities or tend to other business they need to tend to in person. And then every year they send through Christmas train that stop to entertain young children and people living in these remote areas with music and Christmas treats. The conductors on the train have come to know quite a few of these people living on large pastoral leases because they are often their only physical contact with the outside world.
The locals share tales of camels on the loose and dingoes surrounding their homes and eating their water pipes to get water out of their plastic irrigation pipes in the dry seasons. There were many kangaroos to be seen hopping away from the train as well as livestock who just roam over the rails. I asked one of the conductors whether they ever get hit and he acted like it was a fairly regular event. Putting up fences in such remote areas just isn’t worth it. Of the stops the train made, we were only permitted to get off at two of them, both for fuel and water: Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and Cook in South Australia. Kalgoorlie is still a sizable town thriving off the gold industry, but Cook is more or less a ghost town now with only a 4 residents. Cook was originally set up to service all trains with fuel and water with a school, hospital, swimming pool, golf course, airport, etc with 35 inhabitants — all at government expense but it with dissolved when the train networks were privatized. Cook has reached 48C (118F) at times but it was merely 23C (the mid 70’s) where we were there.
Along the Nullarbor Plain you would see the odd radio tower or tiny community. Everything seemed to rely on solar panels and rainwater tanks for survival. At one point we even came past a fresh looking brand new sizable airport in the middle of nowhere. Staring off into the horizon in any direction often brought strange parallax illusions of small objects racing in different directions because it was hard to judge distances. Even with all the desolate views out the windows, I still found myself quite mesmerized by the eerily beautiful scenery.
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