Forget the Trans-Siberian – Griff Rhys Jones tackles the Trans-Australian Railway

The Australians, let’s face it, are an urbanised lot. The majority of their land (the bare bit, the wild bit, the difficult bit) lies beyond the living space of 85 per cent of the population – and with good reason. It’s a rough and dangerous place. And it’s vast.

But the Aussies are also very sensible. Mercifully, they provide an excellent means to explore their massive frying-pan of a continent in comfort. The outback may represent the equivalent of outer space, a hot moon of Venus, but we were going to take a rolling Sputnik – a well-equipped and serviced train, trundling out along a track that must surely boggle the mind of any maintenance contractor. No human beings live anywhere near hundreds of miles of it. How do they get to it if it buckles or sinks? Unlike the Trans-Siberian express, there is no locality to this trans-Oz railway. It may be shorter, but it crosses a whole continent. The Indian Pacific line is more exciting, literally more “outlandish”, than any frozen waste choo-choo. How can you not want to go?

And so a black Range Rover (carrying enough sweeties to hyper-activate an infant school) ferried us through Sydney to an arrivals desk, mysteriously situated “between platforms three and four”. (A Harry Potter train from a half-platform?) But here the sleek aluminium beast was abundantly visible, with spare carriages knocking about on nearby lines. It was the departure cocktail party that was spread across two platforms.

We had missed our welcome drink, so we plonked ourselves down a little distance from Matt, the on-train entertainer (singing “Let me go home... I wanna go home”) and chatted to Tom from Wakefield.

“They all look of a certain age, don’t they?” he whispered, gesturing at his fellow guests. They were indeed quite a senior complement. I had arrived believing, as usual, that I was still 14. Tom himself was white-haired, stooped and bearded. The other guests were thinking, “I hope we don’t have to sit with those two old crocks.”

A sleeper train demands discipline. Can you get down the corridor without peering through the open doors at fellow passengers unfolding their undies? The Edwardian in me, the little boat man, the tiddly, fusspot claustro-phile, however, exulted in my own cabin. L5 was fitted out in a yellowish blonde wood with multiple cupboards and hidey holes.

“Are you going to leave me a hanger?”

“Of course.” I handed Mrs. Jones one hanger and then, after negotiation, a second (of the four available in our tiny wardrobe). I had smuggled enough clothes aboard for breakfast, lunch and dinner so I was looking forward to a bout of Marx Brothers slapstick when it came to getting dressed. We would be negotiating to be the sitting window-tenant too. Otherwise: perfection. Two bunks, (the top one folded away during the day), a neat little refuse door, a handy inset mirror with switches (the exact function of which was still to be explored), and a door to our own private bathroom cubicle-cum-small cupboard washing-facility-locker. I stupidly expected to find a shower off it and started looking for the door. But it doubles up. You shut the door, douse everything and then a secret attendant clears it up.

A “trivia quiz” was announced as we left Sydney. We were winding our way past those interesting half-used suburban platforms, those back gardens, those fencing panels, sheds and graffiti that litter any out of town track and distinguish a place far more than its central international shopping experiences. I wanted to stay and gaze on the porches and the cricket fields, the exotic flowering trees and cemeteries but we moved forward.

We had to decide on our forthcoming “outings” too. A form. It’s the travel industry essential. A diversion from the supposedly boring business of travel itself. I didn’t particularly want contrived distractions. I just wanted to look at the rusting cars and the tin roofs.

The Blue Mountains were satisfactorily blue, or rather a dusty green. (The long distance colour is attributed to a haze of eucalyptus oil.) We had explored and poked our noses into things, failed to answer Trivia questions, unpacked and forensically examined the saloon car by this point, and now there was time to gaze through the windows. Valleys dotted with trees slipped past. My wife spied a wallaby. I didn’t believe her. But then I commandeered the window seat and peered into a marsupial-free dusk until my eyes ached.

The livery of the dining car was attractive and sumptuous. Etched glass, brocade banquettes, linen napery, carved bosses and a touch of brass gave a hint of 19th-century cowboy/bordello elegance (although nobody arrived in frilly knickers and bright red skirts). This was railway as railway should be. Solicitous staff offered second helpings and free drinks. Our rooms were discretely serviced while we were absent - no heaving down of bunks by yourself in a swaying cabin. We ate well and prepared to sleep badly.

I woke at 5.45am and we were already in Broken Hill. I peered out under the blind. The biggest pit of silver, lead and zinc in the world had obviously been discovered in a dirty semi-arid sort of dump. There were slag heaps. Pit machinery. A low sun bathed it all in a golden light.

“What transpired here on the ground is nothing more than bloody murder!” Our guide on our first tour turned his mouth down and gestured dramatically around the Victorian town. He was lamenting the falling population of Broken Hill, brought about by technical improvements to the mining process. We were on an authentic working-man experience. Right down to the tea and buns in the corner of the Institute. An agitprop sketch of the kind that that had last fired me up in the Seventies followed. It didn’t last long. I applauded politely, as I had then.

“Did you enjoy that?” Our guide was now seeking reassurance.

“Yes!” we chorused

“Did you all get a pasty?”

“Yes!” We cried again.

As the train slid on and away from Broken Hill, I wondered how long we had been in this new, red, raw landscape. We had fallen asleep amid green hills, but now we were definitely in the out-back. There is no official barrier. It’s been observed that the outback is more a state of mind than an actuality – and we hadn’t even left New South Wales yet. But the dusty semi-desert and scrub reached out to the horizon on both sides. It was exciting to spot a ditch. Even, perplexingly, the occasional wet one. It only rains about eight inches a year here, and yet there they were, the whole eight of them, lying in a trough by the track.

There were sheep too. At one point, there was a village or, at least, a cluster of houses by an empty road. And strangely there was a funny little house on a quarter acre, surrounded by a tight wall, firmly sitting in its designated plot. It might so easily have grabbed hold of a few dozen acres of Dungeness-style emptiness without anybody noticing, surely. But, of course, someone actually owns this bare wilderness. The wall marked the beginning of someone else’s dust.

Mrs Jones spotted another two kangaroos. I had already gone back to my book. But now I set it aside and again stared avidly into the Ned Kelly landscape, noting the lines of sage bushes, the wind-flattened hills and the absolute absence of marsupials.

Aaron, the steward, arrived to clear our breakfast table. “Did you see the family of emus?” he asked brightly. I frowned and was back gazing hopelessly into the emptiness.

The bleakness didn’t last. The outback on this route was not interminable. Suddenly we were in rolling grassland again: South Australia. An isolated, grand farm stood up a white drive in a stand of trees. A sheep station’s massive flocks, penned in hurdles, were awaiting the dipping moment.

As I come out of our cabin two guys were coming down the other way talking. I scuttled back like a crab to let them pass.

“We are exploring the whole train,” they said.

“Where have you come from?”

“Colchester.”

“No, I mean now.”

“Oh. Up the Platinum end.”

Like Leonardo de Caprio, assuming I might be ordered back to steerage at any moment, I joined my new friends to visit the posh bit. This was a long train. Dozens of carriages repeated the formula of a sleeping compartment, a saloon carriage and then a dining car, in turn. At one “Alice-in-Wonderland” point, we suddenly passed through a wavy carriage, with a twisting corridor. This was where the single bunks were.

“Of course, it’s much more expensive up here,” my new friend explained in “Platinum”. He pulled the door open to show me a genuine room with two armchairs side by side which would transform during dinner into a couple of single beds. And, to one side, he ushered me into the ultimate luxury appurtenance - a whole bathroom. Later we popped into their lounge area to stroke the duck-egg leather covered banquettes.

But, you know, I wasn’t envious. It was more money, but the ambience was similar in both classes – relaxed, spacious, olde-worlde-timey-travelly-throwback-rolling-stock-luxury. I was content to be “Gold”.

“They are old – the passengers – aren’t they?” observed my Essex boy as he said goodbye. Though he was certainly as old as me and I was older than most.

“It’s like a cruise on the rails,” he decided.

Shortly after lunch, we slid into Adelaide’s stylish Parklands terminal, also home to the Overlander, bound for Melbourne and the Ghan going to Darwin. We lost some passengers and gained others. Avoiding chocolate, lederhosen and wine excursions Mrs Jones and I settled for a tour of the Museum of South Australia, where we were escorted past the icons of the route ahead: aboriginal artefacts, minerals, entire skeletons of extinct ocean predators (from opalised fossil bones) and the skeletons of megafauna.

The next morning I quietly celebrated my 65th birthday 12 hours out from Adelaide, in a red-earthed wilderness dotted with green bushes and spindly trees under a sharp blue sky. I decided this was limbo perfection. I didn’t want more excursions or stops. I just wanted the ever-changing bush outside my window. It was like a flickering camp fire: mostly the same but never quite; soothing and absorbing.

I was dismayed to think that we were already beginning our third day. I could have taken more travel. More cabin. More restful nights in clean linen, rocking and rumbling gently in the belly of this onward-rushing serpent of a train. But finally, it was my turn to squawk. As a birthday treat, I was granted a clear view of an emu over my bacon while swapping convention stories with a political consultant from Denver.

By midday, we were passing Watson Sidings in the Nullabor, which is Latin for “no trees”. This is Royal Flying Doctor territory: marvellously flat and bristling with sage. We glimpsed a siding and the remains of habitation where, we were told over the tannoy, three thousand scientists once tested Britain’s own atomic bombs.

Time itself did get confusing on this trip. We were perpetually travelling west. Meals started to arrive more quickly than expected. Before we got to bed in Adelaide we were told it was now eight o’clock, not half past nine. No wonder people started getting up at five. Somewhere at the Western Australian border we lost more hours. We were following the longest straight bit of track in the world, 297 miles of it. There were dingoes out there, possibly. Maybe a camel we were told. But I had seen my last living creature. Instead only salt bush – bobbly, low and an appealing grey blue.

After a while I began to entertain a fantasy of how nice it would be if the train could explore at will and we could persuade it to roam about the desert off the track. I wanted to confirm that the landscape was similar a few miles to the north. There was, after all, a lot of it out there. The map showed that we were crossing the very southern fringe of the continent. The rest of this blistering expanse of outback stretched 2,000 miles beyond my window in a northerly direction. No wonder the Australians huddle in cities, like ports on the edges of a great sea of earth.

Cook, once a railway depot but now a shed, rumbled up on the starboard side. This tiny outpost was occupied by four people, though any sense of decayed isolation was a little dissipated by 210 passengers crawling all over it taking photos. There was, as one might have expected, nothing else to do particularly. In Rawlinna, six hours later, at our final halt, we waited on board until the crew were ready and then, in front of a peeling post office, we ate a meal of lamb and sausages in the dusk, entertained with spirited renditions of old pop songs by Matt – our entertainments officer - in a hat.

It grew dark. We were actually, at this moment, at this halt, perched on the edge of a sheep station two and a half million acres in dimension. Each paddock took eight hours to clear by plane. These huge spreads were the exact opposite of subsistence agriculture. They employed hardly anybody, accommodated fewer, and stocked vast herds. But, despite that, there was nothing to be seen of it from where we were, unless you counted the grilled lamb on every table.

Our train even offered up its own little Agatha Christie mystery. At breakfast on the final day there was the sudden appearance of a young man. Almost a student, and possibly hiding from the agents of gerontology, he had avoided every single jaunt or dinner and smuggled himself across a continent without giving himself away until we were nearing our final destination. But by then, the ordinary trackside sights were coming into view. It was as if we were arriving from another world: a few more farm buildings, fences, horses, roads, vehicles. Hedges. Garages. A smattering of houses. Rows of terraces. Just the sort of ordinary trackside incident you might expect alongside any railway in Britain. It had novelty value after three days of emptiness. Suddenly we were engulfed by the outskirts of Perth and the urban world. On trains everywhere, even in Africa there are always people outside, but in Oz we had to take our human beings with us. And then we arrived. And then even they were gone.   

How to do it

• Griff travelled as a guest of Journey Beyond, the owners and operators of The Ghan, the Indian Pacific, the Great Southern and The Overland routes in Australia. The four days/three nights Indian Pacific journey from Sydney to Perth or vice versa costs from AUS$1,979 (£1,075) per person.

• Griff stayed at The Westin Perth, where rooms start from £119 per night. Click here to see our full review and to book.

• For more information on Western Australia, visit westernaustralia.com