The Indian-Pacific train ☞ (updated)

Now the train ride with the Indian-Pacific belongs to the past. The train starts in Sydney and takes 65 hours to reach Perth (equivalent to the flight time to the moon), with a stopover in Adelaide, where I boarded. It consists of about 28 carriages and has a length of 675 meters.

Before departure, there was dinner at the National Wine Center. With wine from the region. Here I got the first taste of the language challenges regarding social gatherings during meals. The English-speaking fellow passengers are very communicative. And so the first evening was already full of stories.

The route leads through the Nullarbor Plain. This limestone plain is one of the driest areas in Australia. The vegetation is very sparse. Often, the shoreline of the imaginary lake appeared on the horizon, but it never seemed to be reached. This plain is home to the longest straight railway track in the world (478 kilometers).

Halfway, there was the first stop in Cook. Here, the locomotives were refueled and water was replenished for the carriages. On the Sydney-Perth route, the train requires 29,000 liters of diesel and around 1,500 liters of water per carriage. A train usually consists of 28 carriages, including two carriages with generators for power production.

Today, there are still 4 people living in Cook, who operate this station. In the past, Cook was an outpost with around 200 inhabitants and is located in the Nullarbor Desert.

In the evening, the train stopped at Rawlinna, the largest sheep farm in Australia, where there was dinner with roast lamb under the open sky.

In the late afternoon on Saturday, I arrived in Perth.