allowed to get off and look around. It was agreeable to move about without having to steady yourself against a swaying wall every couple of paces, but the thrill of Cook swiftly palls. There was nothing much to it – a railway station and post office, a couple of dozen prefabricated bungalows standing on dusty ground, a little shop whose shelves were mostly bare, a shuttered community centre, an empty school (it was the middle of school holidays), a small open-air swimming pool (also closed), and an airstrip with a limp windsock. The heat was terrific. On every side desert lapped at the town like floodwater.
I was standing there with a map of Australia, surveying the emptiness and trying to absorb the ungraspable factthat if I walked north from here I wouldn’t come to a paved surface for 1,100 miles, when Trevor trotted up and told me we had been given permission to travel for an hour in the locomotive, so that he could take photos. This was a rare treat, and exciting news. Just before the train resumed its journey, we climbed aboard the locomotive with two replacement drivers, Noel Coad and Sean Willis, who would take the train on to Kalgoorlie.
They were genial and laid-back, in their late twenties or early thirties. Their cab was snug and comfy – homey even in a high-tech sort of way. It featured a fancy console with lots of switches and toggles, three shortwave radios and two computer screens, but also a number of domestic comforts: a kettle, a small refrigerator, an electric hotplate for cooking. Coad drove. He flipped a couple of switches, moved a gear lever a fraction of an inch, and we were off. Within a couple of minutes we were up to our cruising speed of 100 kilometres an hour.
I sat quite still, fearful of touching anything that would get us on the evening news, and enjoyed the novel perspective of looking straight ahead. And what an ahead it is on the boundless Nullarbor. Before us stretched a single-line track, two parallel bars of shining steel, dead straight and painfully shiny in the sunshine, and hatched with endless rungs of concrete sleepers. Somewhere in the vicinity of a preposterously remote horizon the two gleaming lines of steel met in a shimmery vanishing point. Endlessly, monotonously, we hoovered up sleepers as we progressed, but however much we pressed onward the vanishing point stayed always in the same place. You couldn’t look at it – well, I couldn’t look at it – without getting a headache.
‘How far is it to the next curve?’ I asked.
‘Three hundred and sixty kilometres,’ Willis answered.
‘Don’t you go crazy out here?’
‘No,’ they replied in unison and with evident sincerity.
‘Do you ever see anything to break the monotony – animals and so forth?’
‘A few ’roos,’ Coad said. ‘A camel from time to time. Once in a while somebody on a motorbike.’
‘Really?’
‘On that.’ He indicated a rough dirt maintenance road that ran alongside the track. ‘Very popular with the Japanese for some reason. Something to do with an initiation into a club or something.’
‘We saw a bloke on a bicycle the other week,’ Willis volunteered.
‘No kidding?’
‘Japanese bloke.’
‘Was he all right?’
‘Out of his mind if you ask me, but he seemed all right. He waved.’
‘Isn’t it awfully risky out there?’
‘Nah – not if you keep to the track. There’s fifty or sixty trains a week along this line, and nobody’s going to leave you out here if you’re in bother.’
We had arrived at a siding called Deakin, where the Indian Pacific had to pull over to let a freight train through, and where Trevor and I were to return to the passenger section. We hopped down from the locomotive and walked briskly back along the train towards the passenger carriages. (And you would walk briskly too, believe me, if you were outside a train with its motor running in the middle of a desert.) At the door of the first passenger carriage, David Goodwin, the train
I was standing there with a map of Australia, surveying the emptiness and trying to absorb the ungraspable factthat if I walked north from here I wouldn’t come to a paved surface for 1,100 miles, when Trevor trotted up and told me we had been given permission to travel for an hour in the locomotive, so that he could take photos. This was a rare treat, and exciting news. Just before the train resumed its journey, we climbed aboard the locomotive with two replacement drivers, Noel Coad and Sean Willis, who would take the train on to Kalgoorlie.
They were genial and laid-back, in their late twenties or early thirties. Their cab was snug and comfy – homey even in a high-tech sort of way. It featured a fancy console with lots of switches and toggles, three shortwave radios and two computer screens, but also a number of domestic comforts: a kettle, a small refrigerator, an electric hotplate for cooking. Coad drove. He flipped a couple of switches, moved a gear lever a fraction of an inch, and we were off. Within a couple of minutes we were up to our cruising speed of 100 kilometres an hour.
I sat quite still, fearful of touching anything that would get us on the evening news, and enjoyed the novel perspective of looking straight ahead. And what an ahead it is on the boundless Nullarbor. Before us stretched a single-line track, two parallel bars of shining steel, dead straight and painfully shiny in the sunshine, and hatched with endless rungs of concrete sleepers. Somewhere in the vicinity of a preposterously remote horizon the two gleaming lines of steel met in a shimmery vanishing point. Endlessly, monotonously, we hoovered up sleepers as we progressed, but however much we pressed onward the vanishing point stayed always in the same place. You couldn’t look at it – well, I couldn’t look at it – without getting a headache.
‘How far is it to the next curve?’ I asked.
‘Three hundred and sixty kilometres,’ Willis answered.
‘Don’t you go crazy out here?’
‘No,’ they replied in unison and with evident sincerity.
‘Do you ever see anything to break the monotony – animals and so forth?’
‘A few ’roos,’ Coad said. ‘A camel from time to time. Once in a while somebody on a motorbike.’
‘Really?’
‘On that.’ He indicated a rough dirt maintenance road that ran alongside the track. ‘Very popular with the Japanese for some reason. Something to do with an initiation into a club or something.’
‘We saw a bloke on a bicycle the other week,’ Willis volunteered.
‘No kidding?’
‘Japanese bloke.’
‘Was he all right?’
‘Out of his mind if you ask me, but he seemed all right. He waved.’
‘Isn’t it awfully risky out there?’
‘Nah – not if you keep to the track. There’s fifty or sixty trains a week along this line, and nobody’s going to leave you out here if you’re in bother.’
We had arrived at a siding called Deakin, where the Indian Pacific had to pull over to let a freight train through, and where Trevor and I were to return to the passenger section. We hopped down from the locomotive and walked briskly back along the train towards the passenger carriages. (And you would walk briskly too, believe me, if you were outside a train with its motor running in the middle of a desert.) At the door of the first passenger carriage, David Goodwin, the train
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