I Like Trains: The Indian-Pacific

I made a very grave mistake my second night (of three) on the Indian-Pacific Railroad, which was whisking me (slowly, a gentle whisk) from Perth to Sydney. I had too many glasses of wine. I refuse to say that I was drunk, because I think by normal, two-feet-planted-shakily-on-the-ground drinking standards, I was not too bad off; however, when your entire world is constantly in motion, your standard for drunk changes. I should have known something was wrong when it didn’t feel like the train was moving anymore, when I walked back to my room and thought, ‘Golly, my balance is improving, guess I’m getting my sea legs!’, when in actuality I was probably bouncing down the corridor like a loosed pinball. Needless to say, being hungover on a train was not an experience that I would care to relive, although I will say that there was something wonderful about the knowledge that I had nowhere to go, no place I had to be, no commitments I had to keep up. I could just lay in my little berth and stare out the window and wish, fervently and unrealistically, that the world would stop moving. 

Loungin' in the lounge car

Apart from this brush with inebriation (which I maintain was not my fault - 1) it was an open bar, which just requires you, at some point or another, to take advantage of that and 2) how can you walk away when an older gent is telling you the sweetest and most heart-breaking love story you’ve ever heard? Answer - you can’t. You just keep drinking with him.), I cannot recommend a long train journey enough, if you’re of the disposition to find joy in staring out windows and reading and chatting with septua- and octogenarians. Happily, I am of such a disposition, so my three days on the Indian-Pacific were a completely blissful taste of what I hope to be like when I’m 80 - that is, a classy old broad riding trains and drinking just enough wine and maybe flirting with the 30-year-old porters. The train itself was gorgeous, all gleaming wood and sparkling brass, with upholstery that occasionally made you wonder if it had been redecorated since the ‘70s. I had originally planned to ride in the equivalent of coach, which would have involved spending my 3 days in, more or less, an airplane seat. Luckily, my beautiful parents convinced me that this was a horrible idea, and so I found myself in Gold Class, which just sounds so horribly swanky. After coming off of Lyndon Station, I found myself somewhat concerned about what I could wear that was worthy of Gold Class status - if I wrapped a slightly battered sarong around my shoulders, could I pretend it was a shawl?

Yeah, I took a mirror selfie. I'm not ashamed.

My berth (I’m trying to use train lingo, but truthfully, I have no idea if that’s the correct term or not; let’s just pretend it is shall we?) was a wonder to behold. When I first walked in it was in its ‘daytime’ configuration - one-person bench seat, a small table, and a little stool. There was a tiny vanity tucked into a corner, with a stainless steel washbasin that folded down (I have to confess, this was one of my favorite parts of the compartment - it was just so damn clever!) and a skinny little half-closet with two very skinny little hangers. And of course, there was a window that took up almost the entire wall opposite the door. The whole room was perfectly comfortable, and roughly the size of a double bed. Where, I wondered, would the bed actually come from? And where would it go? I never saw the bed-making process in action, because I preferred to believe in the magic of it (magic created by porters, I am aware). I would return from dinner to find my bed pulled down, slotted perfectly between the closet and the vanity, with a chocolate on my pillow. Honestly, I would have slept on a concrete slab as long as they kept putting chocolates on it; it doesn’t take much to convince me that you are running one classy establishment. Luckily, this bed was far from a concrete slab; it was a veritable nest of comfort. During breakfast, my bed would just as magically disappear into the wall. Sadly, this time they did not leave me chocolates. 

Sink!

No sink!

Truthfully though, I didn’t need the chocolates, because the main purpose of the trip appeared to be to stuff as much food into us as physically possible. I would have loved to have seen what the kitchen looked like on that train, because they were turning out some truly impressive meals. Breakfast was only two courses, but lunch and dinner were both three course meals, with cream-laden desserts. We had a swanky dining car, complete with chandeliers and beautiful table cloths and settings, which provided some entertainment when we went through the bumpy stretch of track that straddles the Blue Mountains, as people desperately tried to keep their plates from forming a suicide pack with the cutlery and jumping to the floor. Each meal was a bit like a round of dining roulette - you never knew who you would be seated with. Shockingly, this never really became awkward; I sat next to some people who I absolutely loved chatting with, and some with whom it was a bit more trying, but if ever the conversation completely lagged, the train itself provided ample fodder for opinion. The biggest complaint people seemed to lodge was that they had trouble sleeping, but I found it sublime. Blame it on my parents driving me around to lull me to sleep when I was a baby, but I have trouble keeping my eyes open in any moving vehicle, particularly trains. Give me a comfy bed and no responsibilities, and I probably could have simply slept the 3 days on the train away. My only regret is that I didn’t realize sooner that I could sleep with the blinds up (because who, exactly, is going to be peeping in the window of a moving train? If you have an actual answer to that question, please don’t tell me, because I imagine it will really creep me out); only on my last night did it occur to me to keep them up, and I was rewarded with a view of an impossibly starry sky while I dozed off.

While sleeping on a train is heavenly, waking life on a train is a recipe for slapstick comedy. I frequently felt like I was in a farcical reimagining of Murder on the Orient Express. The train hallways themselves were the image of another time, all twisting corridors and warm, dim light, and the hush of carpeted footsteps. But then you put people into the mix, and it become a dance of absurdity. We all lurched around like zombies with an inner-ear disorder, one hand braced against the wall, the other clutching at the air as if maybe we could convince it with a good grope to turn solid and give us a little support in this rocking environment. Two people most certainly could not pass each other in those narrow hallways, so people would resort to trying to squeeze into open doorways, frequently stumbling into the middle of someone’s card game, or nap, or conversation, or would have to attempt to back up to the end of the corridor. Each car ended in two doors, which meant that to pass from car to car you had to shimmy through a series of four doors, which all held very strong opinions on whether they wanted to open or not. Given that we tended to travel in packs before and after meals, this led to conga-lines of people snaking through the corridors, rushing to hit the narrow stretches before a conga-line came from the opposite direction, initiating a very polite conga-battle. These on-going negotiations were further complicated by the physical impediments that some of the good folks with me were subject to; all I can say is, I definitely saw a cane wielded as a weapon, although this wasn’t particularly effective, as the narrow corridor prevented a good follow-through on the swing, so the lovely lady had to be content with using it like a cattle prod. There was another woman whom I only saw in the lounge car (because yes, we had a lounge car, with a full bar, and it was bloody beautiful), I assume because she couldn’t actually fit down the hallways. No judgement - after a few of those meals, I wasn’t convinced I would fit down the hallway, let alone through the door to my room, which, when the bed was down, opened to about a 30 degree angle before sticking fast on said bed. 

However, I rarely ventured out of my room, except at feeding times (I kept telling myself I would skip a meal, but the food was just so damn good that it seemed a shame to miss an opportunity to eat it); I was perfectly content to just watch the world go past my movable hotel room, as I came to think of it. There’s something stunning about a train journey, about seeing the earth change around you. With commercial planes, the pleasure of the journey is lost - you’re not anywhere, really, when you’re in a plane, and even the sensation of flying is lost, because you are so disconnected from the world. But on a train, it is all about journey, about scenery rushing past, about day falling into night. In some strange way, traveling by train felt more like flying than flying does, I think because I could sense the thrill of movement. We operated on ‘train time’, which effectively meant that we ignored the time zone we were in until it suited the conductor, when an announcement would be made and we would all, presumably, synchronize our watches (although my phone didn’t seem to understand this game). I loved this idea, as if we were in our own little bubble, and the world outside was just a movie put on for our entertainment. There was an inter-train music network, with six different stations to choose from - I found the big band/standards/swing station (it seemed only fitting) and tried to pretend that I was a glamorous and mysterious woman with a dark past. More than once, I danced in the very small space in my room available for this activity - this destroyed any hope I had of being glamorous or mysterious, as the only way to make my attempts at dancing more comical is to put them in a tiny, moving, confined space. I was more successful at showering on the train (who didn’t fall down? This girl!), which I was much more amused by than I probably had any right to be. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the shower - it was a nice shower, good water pressure, pretty roomy - but I couldn’t get over the fact that I was showering in a moving vehicle. I just wished they had put a window in there, and piped in the big band music; I never would have left. 

Thanks Cook.

We did have occasional off-train excursions, of which my favorite, hands down, was to Cook, a little town in the Nullarbor (Latin for ‘no trees’, and aptly named). Cook exists solely to resupply the trains that come through. It used to be much bigger, but now boasts 5 residents. 5. The next closest towns are many hundreds of kilometers away. The town used to be big enough to have a school, a hotel, and other assorted buildings, which have now all fallen into a state of disrepair; in short, Cook is just this side of a ghost town. We had half-an-hour to wander around, and I promptly stuck my head into the old school (don’t picture a school, picture two largish rooms stacked on top of each other) and was utterly not disappointed. Old farming equipment rusted on top of broken desks, tattered posters hung in shreds from the walls, and someone had spray painted GHOST across one wall. As I poked a little further and wandered past a mound of books mouldering in a corner, I found an animal carcass, mostly skeleton but with enough fur hanging on to give it maximum horror-effect. I am not too proud to admit that my courage started to wane a bit at that point, and I decided the train sounded really good again. We also wandered a bit around Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill, the gold and silver capitals of Australia, respectively, where I saw open-cut mining pits so big that they looked like something out of a James Bond movie, where the super villain is creating a super hole to extract super uranium, or something like that (assume it’s one of the bad Bond movies). The bus driver in Kalgoorlie also helpfully pointed out the two brothels still in operation, one of which even gave historic tours! Sadly, we didn’t have time to stop.

Super-uranium super-bulldozer

But back to that hangover. When I wasn’t chowing down that day in the dining car (because even a hangover wasn’t going to keep me from that delicious food, plus I had a lunch date with two lovely gents from New Zealand), I was mostly curled up in my berth alternately snoozing and watching the low scrub and red earth of the desert roll past. But just before sunset I roused myself, made a cup of tea, and was treated to a spectacular show outside my window. We were just pulling out of the high outback (the Indian-Pacific track, at one point, goes 460-some-odd kilometers without a turn or bump, the longest straight stretch of track in the world), but the terrain still provided a fairly unobstructed view of the sky. As the sun set out the left-hand side of my window, night fell on the right, giving the impression that night wasn’t a temporal phenomenon, but rather a place, a locality that we were pulling into. Dusk never really happened, but rather the sun went down in orange flames and then night pulled a blue curtain over the bush and the Milky Way came to life above us. It was stunning. I meant to tell my new friends about it at dinner, but I became distracted by the most perfect ratatouille, and by the time they rolled out the lavender panna cotta, I’d decided that that sunset was just for me anyway.