Onboard the Indian Pacific, traveling to Adelaide through the Nullarbor Plain by rail… I woke up to the spectacular expanse of the Nullarbor Plain – big blue cloudless skies over the stillness of the desert landscape. There are no trees in sight; hence the name – null arbor, no trees in Latin. There’s the occasional tall bush in the midst of unending flat reddish sand, covered with low shrubs and only a maintenance road running aside the tracks in sight. This is the world’s largest single exposure of limestone bedrock and it is flat in a way which dwarfs the plains of the Midwest of the US. I headed to breakfast soon after awaking up to avoid the rush of people waking late after the excursion the night before. Breakfast was coffee, eggs, bangers (sausages) and fruit for me. The conversation at my table was mostly between the ladies talking excitedly about the excursion to Kalgoorlie the night before. Last night’s excursion had included a show about the history of the gold rush in Western Australia. The area around Kalgoorlie was the center of the Western Australia Gold Rush era in the late 1890s and still has a working open pit gold mine today. I was reminded of the statue of C.Y. O’Connor in Fremantle. In addition to his work on Fremantle Harbour, he was the engineer for the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme which brought water from a dam near Perth to the gold fields and the Kalgoorlie area. The project was very controversial in its time and ultimately led to O’Connor’s suicide, but it still used as the major source of water for the region today. 

The train made a long stop at Rawlinna in the morning. We were not able to get out to walk, because we were on an alternate track away from the station. We were held up for about an hour because a freight train was on the wrong track. Though there wasn’t much to see, the delay did mean that we had cellular service while near the station. In general, there’s only intermittent wifi/cellular service out this far into the Nullarbor. No real surprise. There just aren’t many settlements out this way and little for anyone to do. Our midday stop was in Cook, Australia where the railway lines from Adelaide in the east and Perth in the west, met to form the transcontinental railway in 1970. There were individual rail lines across the country before then, but they consisted of several different widths/gauges of track. One could make the journey across Australia by rail before 1970; you just had to change trains many times. Cook is a bit of a ghost town now: many buildings are still standing – the rail station, an infirmary, a general store and a few homes – all maintained for mostly tourism and historical purposes. Very few people live there now.

The Indian Pacific was traveling along the longest stretch of straight railway in the world – nearly 300 miles of straight unbroken track. The tracks ahead and behind the train are so straight that they seem a bit surreal, like some computer-generated scene. As I got back on the train, I learned that a couple of young women working as staff on the train were from Wyoming, working in the Aussie hospitality industry. Given the iconic nature of the train, their time working on the Indian Pacific will look great on their resumes! It was odd to speak to Americans after so long. Of course, they were working, so we could not chat for very long. I would have really liked to have learned how they ended up working this train!

Back on the Indian Pacific, I took the opportunity to retreat to my cabin and enjoy reading for a while. We left the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-afternoon; I found the sight of trees was oddly affecting and most welcome. Later, I mingled with other guests in the lounge for a drink or two before dinner. I met a Canadian couple, The Bests; it was refreshing to have a conversation with more subjects than food or the weather! I even got recommendations of SubStack writers to try and of a history book to read by Howard W. French. I had another delicious dinner at a very quiet table – all men more interested in eating than chit-chat. After dinner, I had a relaxed conversation in the lounge with The Bests, followed by a restful night’s sleep as we approached Adelaide.