Train Day 1 - Perth to Kalgoorlie

Most descriptions of the Indian Pacific railway journey seem to include the adjective "mighty" and this one is no exception. What else can you call it? This is a train with 25 passenger carriages (plus motorail) which crosses a continent – covering a distance of 4.352 km (2,720 miles) – in around 68 hours. It is the second longest scheduled train service in the world (after the Trans Siberian Express). It traverses the longest straight stretch of railway in the world – on the Nullarbor Plain – at 477 km (298 miles). It is impossible to discuss this train without using superlatives.

 

The day began back in Perth though – with much better weather than yesterday. Here's that same view of the twin apartment blocks:

 

 

The ground is still wet, but there's blue sky and the River Swan is looking much more inviting.

 

I found a folder of guest information in the room including these instructions for working the air conditioning:

 

 

I had not previously come across the idea of measuring air conditioning using the height of ferns. They seem to like cool, damp conditions so perhaps if they're smaller, the room is too warm? Well, it was the noisiest thing on the planet and I hadn't any ferns to hand, so I didn't use it and and wouldn't have been able to assess its effect on the plants in any case, so I'm still none the wiser.

 

I left the hotel in good time to make it to the station. I've missed trains before, but this was one train that I really had to catch! Although there's nothing about it in the ticket or (as far as I recall) on the website, the train does not, in fact, leave from Perth station at all, but from East Perth. In Amsterdam terms, this is if the train were leaving from, say, Muiderpoort rather than Centraal. In Edinburgh terms, as if it were leaving from Musselburgh rather than Waverley. East Perth is just another suburb and the station has only about 4 platforms – two for the commuter service into Perth and two for the TransWA services to the east.

 

On the commuter train, they have (as is common) diagrams of the network. I noticed them first on the train to Fremantle last week and found it rather odd:

 

 

East Perth is on the left (on the maroon coloured line) and City West is on the right (on the blue line). The green line is the one that goes to Fremantle, which is south-west of Perth. Now, I realise that these are just diagrams, but it struck me as odd that they'd put east on the left and west on the right. Today, I finally noticed that the diagrams on the other side of the train are mirror images of the one in the picture. In other words, you're always following the various lines in the direction that you're actually travelling. Clever, once you know.

 

This was my first sight of the Indian Pacific – taken from the commuter platform:

 

 

One of the problems of the train is that it is very hard (with my camera, impossible) to take a picture of it all, all at once. The thing is over 700m (2,296 ft) long. It stretches away in both direction as far as the eye can see.

 

There are two classes of travel – red and gold. In red service, you can opt for a shared bunk room or a seat (the seat being quite a bit cheaper). In gold you can opt for a single or bunk cabin. Gold passengers also get a foot mat and flag outside the door...

 

 

Luggage space in the passenger carriages is very limited so my main bag was checked in and the little fold-away one I bought in Singapore was pressed into service. Here is the last I saw of my bag - the greyish one right above the left-hand wheel of the trolley.

 

 

If you're travelling alone, you can have a single berth, but you only get a sink in your room – the double cabins get a shower and toilet as well. The carriage has the oddest arrangement I've seen – instead of having a corridor down one side as is more usual, the corridor here snakes its way down the middle of the carriage in a series of curves. I've tried to capture it here:

 

 

The cabin is, there's no getting away from it, small. At the chair end, I can comfortable touch both walls with my elbows. The other end is a little wider and has a sink next to an extra stool:

 

 

I guess it's a little over 6 feet long (say a couple of metres) as I can just lie down lengthwise. My only slight niggle with the cabin is that the seat faces backwards and I much prefer to sit facing forwards. Still, there are no other cabins and I've solved the problem by folding down the bed and lying on it the other way round. This gives me a great view out of the window as well – I'm on the south, and therefore shady, side of the train so I can have the blinds open without being blinded by the sun.

 

Soon after setting off, each guest (we're not passengers, or even customers, we're guests) was visited to discuss which meal sitting they'd like and whether they wanted to be woken with a cup of tea or coffee. I got the first sitting for the meals which makes breakfast pretty early (07:00) but has dinner at a much more netjes 18:00 rather than 20:30. Since they announce the first breakfast to everyone, I guess you'd be awake anyway.

 

We were no sooner out of Perth than it was time for lunch. Meals are included in the gold ticket price and are served in the Queen Adelaide restaurant – a very fancy affair with starched table cloths and silver cutlery. Today I was sitting with a retired priest from Perth and a couple from Sydney who have been visiting their daughter in Perth. The train tends to attract that sort of demographic.

 

The train runs at a sedate pace, it must be said. It almost always gives way to freight trains so it is not unusual for it just to stop and wait for a while. Most of the line to Sydney is single track and so we may have to wait in a passing loop while a freight train approaches from the other direction and then goes past. In most countries, I think that passengers have priority, but I imagine that out here, the real money is earned through cargo. Apart from anything else, if the passengers were in a hurry, they'd be in an aircraft.

 

Looking out the window, I spotted these pipes running alongside the track. Their purpose was explained at lunch – they are the main water supply for the city of Kalgoorlie, and they run for over 600km from the mountains east of Perth:

 

 

The first stop is the aforementioned Kalgoorlie – some 700 km from Perth. The town exists solely because of mining and, these days, that means gold mining. There is also nickel in the rock around Kalgoorlie, but the current price makes it uneconomical to extract. The train stops here for around 5 hours and there is an optional bus tour, which I opted in to. By the time we got to Kalgoorlie, it had been dark for a couple of hours, but it still seemed like the right thing to do.

 

The first couple of things pointed out on the tour were the local K-Mart and Coles branches. I wondered if it was just going to be a small-town tour of a small town, but it soon improved and the driver was telling us tales of the early days of prospecting and how the town grew from nothing to its first 700 citizens inside a week in 1893.

 

We saw some of the notorious hotels (pubs) and heard of some of the exploits. We heard of riots when "native" Australians objected to a perceived bias in favour of Asian immigrants in the allocation of claims. We heard of murderous exploits by mine workers who were caught stealing and illegally processing gold. You'll have to take my word for all this because the (lack of) lighting precluded much in the way of photography. The highlight of the tour was a visit to the "super pit". This is the largest open-cast mine in Australia (and must be one of the largest in the world). It is about 4 or 5 km long, over 1 km wide and currently around 450 metres (1500 ft) deep. This puts the bottom well below sea level, though the sea itself is a good 4 hour drive away. It is going to get bigger, and deeper (another 150 m deep) and is expected to have another 7 years of life as an open-cast mine. At that point, its future will depend on the price of gold. The ore is very low grade, so unless the price is high enough, the current pit will simply be left to fill with water – it requires constant pumping to keep it dry. The water will be hypersaline – more than 6 times as salty as seawater.

 

If the price of gold justifies it, the mine will continue as an underground mine – tunnels will be blasted into the base of the pit and extraction will continue that way.

 

It would be hard to capture the scale of the pit in a photograph by day; by night, it's nigh on impossible. Far below us we could see trucks driving around, being fed by what seemed to be regular JCB-type diggers. However, up in the car park for the visitors' centre, there is an example of one of the scoops from the diggers. Here it is with me standing inside to give a sense of scale:

 

 

When full, it can carry 60 tonnes of ore, and it takes 4 of these scoops to fill one of the trucks that we could see operating way down at the base of the pit. The lorries can carry 225 tonnes of ore and, for every 6 trucks, the company can extract enough gold to make a nugget about the size of a golf ball weighing around 17 ounces. Presumably, it's actually economic to do this.

 

Here is an attempt to picture the lorries and diggers:

 

 

The mine wall is terraced – you can just make that out on the first photograph, along with the lights of one of the trucks making its way up from the base (almost in the centre of the picture).

 

The tour finished up at the red light district. It's not quite on the scale of the Wallen in Amsterdam, but its existence is, perhaps, inevitable in a town where there are so many men working for long periods of time away from home. It seems that there is an unofficial tolerance from the city authorities.

 

There are very strict rules about what may and may not be taken into Australia – anything plant based is not going to be allowed. If you have been anywhere muddy, you have to clean your shoes thoroughly. You are, as I discovered, allowed chocolate. Polo mints and biscuits were also acceptable.

 

Even within the country, there are rules about movement. Western Australia is so remote from the rest of the country, that they can impose movement restrictions of their own. At the station is a special bin for the use of passengers disembarking here to deposit the forbidden items: