My trip on the Indian Pacific
I have been on the Indian Pacific train several times. It is an awesome trip across Australia and you get to meet all sorts of interesting people. These are some photos from the last trip I did on the Indian Pacific, travelling from Sydney to Perth in 2008.
This is the platform at Sydney station, waiting to board. I got to the station fairly early and had to wait for quite a while prior to boarding. I didn't mind as it was better than being late!
This is the first major stop, Broken Hill in NSW. The locals converge on the platform and sell stuff to visitors who are stretching their legs. I bought my brother a nice pen made out of bullets which I thought was really neat.
This is the side of one of the carriages. Still at Broken Hill.
The train stops for a while at Adelaide. I had a wander around the Adelaide city centre, but since this was early Sunday morning, everything was closed.
Adelaide is the "home" of the Indian Pacific train system. They have a large section to themselves and they have loads of spare rolling stock stored there.
I have no idea what kind of bug this is. I had a $2 coin which I put on the ground for size comparrison. It was on the ground near the station and I'm glad I didn't find a live one. Haven't seen one of these before or since.
Not sure what happened here, but it does not look good.
Still at the Adelaide rail yard. I like this photo - reminiscent of a cool winter morning.
This is a bronze statue of a wedge tail eagle in the lobby of the Adelaide train station where the Indian Pacific stops. In case you can't read the placard, it says Indian Pacific - A journey that spans a continent. The largest eagle on Earth, the Australian Wedge Tail Eagle conveys a sense of power, momentum and purpose. It is used as a symbol of the freedom and adventure experienced by one of the worlds great rail journey's on the Indian Pacific.
Side anecdote: there used to be an overland telegraph system which ran along the side of the railway. It is no longer used and most of it is gone. However, a few posts remain. Across the Nullarbor plain, these poles are the tallest structures around and nearly all of them have eagle nests (or remains of such) on them. It makes one wonder how much telegraph traffic was disrupted by these massive birds nesting on the poles!
There were some striking cloud formation over the open plains of Australia. I'm not sure what caused these near-straight edges.
This isn't the same photograph mirrored, this is a different place with a different cloud - but also with the same straight(ish) edge.
It's not until you get out there that the full meaning of "Nullarbor" (no tree) means. The highest vegetation is less than knee height as far as the eye can see in both directions. It makes you wonder how anybody could survive out here - most people travelling across here are in the comfort of the air-conditioned train.
People driving across Australia pass far to the south of here. Other than the train passengers, the only people that come out here are the occasional maintenance workers. It amazes me to think that the original railway was laid by hand, with men wrestling the steel girders into place in the desert heat.
Presumably this is for a disused siding, but I still found it amusing that the railway line has been clamped.
This is in Cook, a tiny little stopover in the middle of nowhere. This used to be a busier town but the population has dwindled. There were about six permanent residents when I went through, and I believe the train no longer stops there.
Not sure why I am fascinated by mechanical things. I liked the simplicity and strength of the wheels that hold up the weight of the train.
Many people take their cars on the train with them. It wasn't until recently that I realised that there was a freight train passing on the other side of our train in this photo. You'd think I'd notice a freight train...
I found this pretty interesting. This is probably one of the last Telecom Australia public phone boxes around. It is (was?) in Cook and used by train passengers as there is no mobile phone reception. No point in the carriers putting a tower out there for people who are there for about two hours once a week. I think Telecom Australia changed it's name to Telstra sometime in the early 90's.
I like this shot. When the train is in motion there is no way for passengers to see the locomotive at the front, so it was nice to take this photo of it without it being in a station.
This isn't quite the shot I wanted. I was hoping to get in the middle of the railway and as high up as I could get the camera in order to get the full effect of the rails leading arrow straight off into the distance but I wasn't allowed to. :o(
I really like this photo and think it's a good one to end on. This is in the desert east of Kalgoorlie and was the last sunset before reaching Perth early the following morning (layover in Kalgoorlie in the middle of the night).
Since we were heading west and directly towards the setting sun it was impossible to get a shot of the sun itself, but the partial cloud cover caught the light quite nicely and made for a decent photo.