Driving the Indian Pacific Train

On the straight and narrow - the NR17 which pulled us across the country. (Photo: Western Australia Trains).

Several years ago, as a travel writer, I was lucky enough to be invited to enjoy the Indian Pacific train journey -- a truly transcontinental journey from the east of Australia to the west: 4352km. Three or four days, one way. Oh, and we did it BOTH ways. So nearly 9000 km. That might sound like some kind of living hell to you, but two things were in my favour ... a/ it was a free media trip (and "free" always suits my budget perfectly) and b/ we went Sydney>Perth first class, and Perth>Sydney in business class.

It was truly amazing in its nothingness, and makes me realise what a huuuge continent Australia is.

On one section of the journey is the longest, straightest section of rail in the world. I wanted to see this from the drivers' cabin, so I decided to push my luck and request permission to be with the drivers for that leg. My request was granted, and that's where we pick up the story ...

A really bushy overgrown part of the Nullarbor Desert. Mostly it's just sand and seashells.

"It’s midsummer. Around 50 degrees Celsius in the shade – if there is any. The sadistic Australian sun beats down on the scorched red earth like an aggrieved dominatrix. Only a few mallee scrub plants manage to eek out an existence in this God-forsaken part of the Outback known -- a tad ironically -- as Forrest. When the Indian Pacific hisses and grinds to a halt to throw a canvas mailbag out to some squint-eyed feral, Dave the purser tells me to make a run for it.

I gallop along the rust-coloured gravel chips up to the front end of the 24-carriage train, dwarfed by the machinery which will take us to Kalgoorlie then on to Perth, completing the 4352 kilometre voyage. The sleepers are concrete; five million in all were laid at a cost of A$100 each.

I am panting -- sweating enough to enter a wet T-shirt contest -- when I reach the dazzling yellow locomotive, Norma Alicia York, or NR17 to the mechanics. I am faced with a set of narrow vertical stairs to clamber, then along a platform to a back door. I expect a tiny cramped cabin, with a driver hunched over the dashboard, dabbing perspiration from his forehead. Instead it opens onto something akin the bridge control room of the Queen Elizabeth 11 (which I haven’t seen) or the Starship Enterprise (which I have): panoramic plate glass windows affording endless visibility on three sides, plus great big rear-vision mirrors to check that the rest of the carriages and passengers are still indeed following. The air-conditioning stops my sweat before rivulets can form. Screeds of typed papers hang from clipboards. Banks of blinking, flashing computer screens line the dashboard, upon which sits a little stove with a kettle whistling merrily away.

Joe turns from his vinyl bucket seat – replete with comfy headrest – and extends his hand, with a broad smile. ‘G’day,’ the greying driver says, laconically. He introduces me to his younger co-driver, Lindsay, who today is on his very first Indian Pacific leg and sits in an identical chair a couple of metres away on the opposite side. They are uniformly dressed in dark blue long-sleeved shirts, matching trousers and black boots, stylishly set off by fluorescent orange safety vests.

With the tilt of a lever, like a Playstation joystick, the train wheezes and groans, the diesel engine corrals its horses. Clanks, rattles and jolts as the couplings on the trailing carriages pick up the slack. We’re underway, with the equivalent power of 5000 harnessed camels, but in no danger of lapping Michael Schumacher at Monaco; the top speed of this beast is 115 kilometres per hour which it can reach within four kilometres. Almost enough time to boil an egg.

The first thing that strikes me is how busy this cabin is: I thought it would be ‘auto pilot’ all the way, feet on the dash board, sipping a leisurely cuppa. But, no.

As the greyish-greenish-reddish Martian landscape floats all around us, the cabin is alive with noise: satellite phones connect them to the clipped and officious commands from Control. A radio links them to other drivers in the area, with a bit of earthy banter in among the official stuff. And every now and again the intercom crackles with a message from the cabin stewards behind. There’s also a radio/CD player on the dashboard, which mutes automatically whenever an incoming message arrives – which is virtually non-stop – so it hardly gets a fair hearing.

Surprisingly, this happens more on this sector because it’s a single one-way affair which freight and passenger trains, east- and west-bound, have to share. Lindsay is forever on the radio to Control and the other drivers for “written orders” which give him permission to go to the next stage. It’s more intense than most air-traffic control discussions I’ve tuned into. I sense there is a lot of arse-covering in this paperwork; with meticulous notes of time and conversations made on clipboards.

Eventually we hit a quiet patch, the steel wheels chanting percussively beneath us, and I can get a word in. Just then, an annoying beep starts up, and a message flashes on the computer. Joe taps a red button – the size of a smallish tomato – with his right hand which lazes on an arm rest, and the computer and alarm hold their fire. ‘Vigilance button,’ he says, explaining that the driver has to hit it every 60 seconds or so in order to tell the computer that he’s awake and on the ball in the absence of any other vital signs. An adjustment to the speed or even the blowing of the train’s whistle is enough to count as ‘active’. I notice it now, Joe almost subconsciously hitting the button every now and then.

Failure to respond to the squawking reminder will send the train into shutdown mode, and it will grind to a halt. In this case, that might be a few hundred metres, but some of the freighters that we pass are pulling 2000 tonnes of freight and, like a supertanker on the high seas, might take around one kilometre to pull up. I glance around the cabin to a clip on the wall labelled “Brake Certificate”. It is empty.

Lindsay is on the learning curve as much as I am. ‘On other routes you can just crank it up and go,’ he says, adding that the automatic signals and technology are not as demanding of the driver’s concentration. Here he gets a physical workout thrown in, too, having to clamber down every now and then to manually throw a line-changing switch.

That about sums up the middle of Australia!

So did they play with train sets as kids? ‘Didn’t have anything to do with ‘em,’ says Lindsay. ‘No, no, no,’ laughs Joe, who has earned the easier ride in the top seat. He’s been on this same route for 16 years.

With deregulation, National Rail is a separate company contracted on a “hook and pull” basis to get the Indian Pacific across the continent. The romance of rail travel is somewhat lost in this age, whereby the Indian Pacific is not one decorously decked-out engine, but any one (or two on the steeper sections like the Blue Mountains) of a number of available locomotives. What they’re pulling behind doesn’t really seem to matter.

However, what’s in front is paramount. Especially with the amount of bounding kangaroos, lumbering camels and grazing cows that find a magnetic attraction to the railway tracks. Joe recounts a story of once hitting a bull at full pace. ‘He took us on … put his head down and charged us. I felt the impact, he was about one tonne, but by the time he came out the back he was just hamburger meat.’ Train 1, Bull 0. But considerable time was spent on the indelicate task of removing blood and guts from the windscreen.

Soon after, we pass a cow on the side of the tracks – wholly intact but on its back with four ram-rod straight legs pointing skyward.

Just then the radio crackles: it’s a football score broadcast of an Aussie Rules game in progress in Victoria. The real world seems so far removed from this cocoon.

The tracks are like shining ribbons of silver forming a tipless triangle to the horizon, about ten kilometres distant, where they are eaten up and dissolve in a hazy shimmering puddle. What greenery there is also points to the same vanishing point, somewhere in the vast nothingness of the 10-million-year-old Nullarbor (surprisingly not an Aboriginal term, instead Latin for “no trees”).

For the next 474.14 kilometres there is not a bend, curve, arc in the track. The longest and straightest railway passage in the world. Traversing what seems like a barren wasteland, but which on closer inspection (and subsequent investigation) is teeming with traces of life or former life. Seashells amazingly litter this desert, remnants from inland seas which dried up millions of years ago, leaving behind such harsh aridity. Beneath the endless redness, subterranean caves – several thousands of kilometres worth, some big enough to hangar a 747 – snake their way stealthily underground.

At full tilt, we’re not making a dent in the distance. The train feels insignificant in this gargantuan grandeur. It doesn’t feel like 115 kilometres per hour feels in a car; more like 75 or 80kph.

A trackside sign heralds the first corner in over 400 kilometres and Joe eases the pace a little.

It’s fascinating, but perhaps less so the second time around, never mind the hundredth or so. The most surprising thing is that one of these drivers has a PhD in philosophy. I ask Joe straight out: Don’t you ever get bored out of your brain? ‘Here, what you see is what you get all the way,’ he says elusively. ‘Around Kitchener is the best, with all the trees and the valleys and stuff.’ The seasonal wildflowers also perk things up. White and yellow Everlastings and Sturt Desert Peas in soothing pastel shades sometimes serenade the West Australian desert. Many passengers deliberately time their Indian Pacific journey to catch the blossoming of this temporary magical carpet between September and November in Perth.

‘Just behind this hill you should see some camels.’ I look out the left window. I see nothing but a slight little undulating mound; Joe’s been on this route too long if he thinks that counts as a hill. We round the elongated bend and … nothing. ‘Only time I haven’t seen ‘em … last time there was about sixty of ‘em,’ Joe says. Yeah, yeah, yeah; the old “should have been here yesterday” fisherman’s story.

By now we are approaching the infamous gold mining town of Kalgoorlie. Joe and Lindsay are tired – it’s been a long, hard day in the office for them since they got on board in Cook nine hours ago, and they talk of grabbing a shower and heading out for a quiet beer or two, possibly at the historical Exchange Hotel.

Somehow I don’t think they’ll be having hamburger for dinner. I know I won’t be."

No MacDonald's here! Or much else for that matter.

Full disclosure: my daughter Jasmine was conceived on this railway journey, so I can vouch for the romance of the trip, and the comfort of the luxurious cabins ;)

(This article ran in several newspapers and magazines at the time, and has been shamelessly lifted from my book Honeymoon for One: Collected Travel Writings from Australia to Zimbabwe, and Everywhere in Between which topped Amazon's 'wedding and honeymoons' chart for several weeks, proving what a lot of rubbish their algorythm is.)

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