Ticket to Ride

by Tom Chesshyre

  I read a few poems about railways from a brilliant collection I've brought with me entitled Train Songs – Edward Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy are all there. It's interesting that almost every contributor selected for the book is male: is there something about trains that appeals particularly to the male mind? Perhaps – or, let's face it and be honest, definitely – though many women I've met on my travels so far have been train lovers, too. Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Wendy Cope are among the few female poets included in Train Songs.

  An extract from Cope's 'Strugnell's Sonnets' catches my eye. The poem wittily describes the effect on others of reading poetry on a train: how if 'all seats are taken' you can leave your 'fellow passengers severely shaken' by pulling out a slim volume of verse. This, says Cope, is proof that 'to recluses… poetry has its uses'. I intend to take Train Songs to the gold-class dining carriage later.

  Tarcoola comes. Tarcoola goes. In 1893, there was a gold rush in Tarcoola (population: 38). My cabin map says the town is named after a racehorse that won the Melbourne Cup that year. I have a lazy afternoon, in the company of War and Peace; on its second trans-continental train, my copy has begun to take on such a tattered look that most second-hand bookshops would surely turn it down. The many miles of the Nullarbor tick by. I listen to a bit of 'Chardonnay/Manhattan' jazz, my channel of choice during daydreaming on the Indian Pacific. Every now and then I go to make a cup of tea in the little kitchen at the end of the carriage. Hardly anyone is about. I expect Position A is more than well occupied in the lounge.

  I skip lunch in the dining carriage as it's so peaceful in my cabin, opting instead for a few snacks I brought with me. I listen to more 'Chardonnay/Manhattan' jazz. I read. I snooze. This is how long train journeys should be.

  When dinner is announced, I go over tactically late so I can avoid various 'characters'. This of course involves running the gauntlet of the gold-class lounge, but this gauntlet cannot be avoided if I want to eat a hot meal. I slip by quietly enough at first, missing the attention of the three diners who have selected to eat in the lounge because it's more comfortable. Then I come to the shrill woman with the shock of blue-grey hair. 'I hope you have taken all their emails so you can send them free copies,' she says, her voice like nails on a chalkboard.

  Her body language could be summed up in one word: hostile. She appears to have been sitting in wait for me and seems to be relishing this encounter in some sort of perverse way. Her tone suggests that she is somehow doing a public good: tackling a miscreant, the bad apple in gold class. I think that by 'taken all their emails', she is referring to the people I have talked to on the train. Is she, and are they, under the impression that I'm some sort of Stephen King-rich novelist heading straight to the bank with a multi-million-dollar book–film rights deal after milking their memories one afternoon on a train? Is this what it's all about – do they want a slice of an imaginary Steven Spielberg deal?

  'Oh yes, of course,' I reply.

  This seems to make her blood boil. What is it with this woman with a shock of blue-grey hair? What have I done to her? She regards me with eyes heavy with make-up and loathing. I don't think I'm particularly good for her health; various indicators of well-being are skyrocketing in the wrong direction. I slip by, thinking: what next?

  Having negotiated the gold-class lounge with only one hateful conversation, I approach the dining carriage – another social minefield, as I found last night. There is, however, at least an element of freedom: the choice of where to sit. I dine with Joe and June, who chat away cheerfully about what we saw today. We have a very nice meal.

  The Indian Pacific may cover long sections of outback where not a lot goes on, yet there's plenty of action. The early morning delivers Adelaide, where we once again board coaches for a short tour. The guide on my coach intends to take us to Mount Lofty. He refers to Mount Lofty in reverential tones as though it's some sort of promised land, although he also tells us that we 'won't see a view' when we get there as it's cloudy. Oh well, we think as we drive off, listening to how Adelaide became a free settlement in 1836 (i.e. it wasn't settled by convicts). The city now has a population of 1.3 million out of South Australia's population of 1.67 million. Vineyards, fruit groves, sheep and cattle provide employment in the interior of the state, but unemployment is a growing problem in the capital: 'Ford and Toyota are closing: component parts. Another 20,000 are losing jobs. Pretty difficult times ahead.'

  We are shown the flying-saucer-like Adelaide Oval sports stadium, opened by the Rolling Stones. Within its grounds, we get a glimpse of a statue of Sir Donald Bradman, who played for South Australia for many years and is considered the best-ever Test cricket batsman. The guide then points out houses worth $1.2 million, explains that a round of golf costs $28 – 'so it's quite affordable to play golf' – and waxes lyrical about a series of mansions on a hill but 'won't comment on their value as I'm not sure what they are worth right now'. These have enormous verandas with fancy lacework and are marked off by whitewashed picket fences. The guide tells us to look to the right to see some 'smaller type houses', and says you can pick up somewhere in the suburbs for between $320,000–500,000: 'That pricing is available.' It's as though he's assessed us and thinks the suburbs are probably better suited to our pockets. I begin to wonder if he's a moonlighting estate agent.

  Adelaide seems clean, green and well-to-do – a tempting place to come and live, indeed. We drive to a car park on Mount Lofty, where the guide tells us that the person who needs to show us in has not arrived as it is before 8 a.m.: 'If you want to use the restrooms do get out, but there's no point in leaving the coach otherwise.' The mountain appears to be closed. A couple of people use the restrooms.

  And that, for us, is the magnificent Mount Lofty. We drive back to the station in 45 minutes of silence.

  'We're on time!' says the guide, sounding extremely relieved when we arrive. He must have been worried we'd miss the train.

  Adelaide Parklands terminal is notable for its extensive gift shop selling silver spoons, packs of cards, jigsaws, train whistles, computer mouse mats, aprons, golf balls, polo shirts, beer glasses and – my favourite – battery-powered beer-bottle coolers that make train sounds when lifted… all stamped with the Indian Pacific wedge-tipped eagle logo. I go to buy one of the train-noise beer holders as life would not, I feel, be complete without one.

  As I wait in the queue, someone bumps into my backpack. 'Oh sorry,' says the shrill woman with the shock of blue-grey hair. Then she realises it's me. 'Oh, it's you. It's your bag. I'm not sorry.' And she moves away. She is with her husband, who trails a couple of steps behind and who never speaks a word that I hear during the entire journey from Perth to Sydney.

  Gunzels, transvestites and metrosexuals

  Adelaide to Sydney, via Broken Hill

  This is the last I am to see of my gold-class friends. At Adelaide, I am downgrading to red class. My main bag is put in the luggage van as there is no storage room where I am going. Red class is separated from my former gold-class section by platinum class. There is no way that the woman with blue-grey hair can get to me; the fine-dining platinum-class elite with their double beds and high-end cocktail lounge blocks her passage.

  I settle into my red and purple red-class seat with a sense of relief. Backpackers and senior citizens make up our number in the solitary red-class carriage. We are here to travel from A to B without three-course meals, cabins playing light jazz, and oneupmanship in the free Sauvignon Blanc and Crown Lager lounge. I am sitting next to a twenty-something guy wearing a loose-fitting grey tracksuit and reading a book on an iPad. He flicks a glance and nods to acknowledge his new neighbour and – formalities over – returns to his book. The seats are not massive but they're at least the business-class size of those on a plane, though they do not fully recline.

  The train jolts forth. John Wicks, the duty manager, stands before us, in his fifties with an Elvis quiff. 'Your world ends at that door,'
he says, after introducing himself. He's pointing to the far end of the carriage. We are not, I gather, to venture elsewhere on the train.

  We are told how to lock the toilet door so as 'not to share a toilet moment with forty-seven other people'; the red-class carriage fits 48 and the toilet is in a prominent position at the front. We are also to 'use it as a toilet only: does everyone agree?' There is no answer. 'Excellent. Beautiful,' he says.

  In the adjoining Matilda cafe-bar carriage, Wicks says, it is 'not kosher to sit there without purchasing something'. He puts in a good word for his cooked breakfasts. 'I've had phone calls from Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver saying, "I heard about your breakfasts." I said, "No. I want the twenty bucks an hour that Great Southern Rail is paying me."'

  With this, he wraps up his spiel and we are left in peace. We are travelling northwards back up the line from whence we came, and are to turn east at Crystal Brook on the final leg to Sydney. Adelaide has been, effectively, a detour. A stop-off is planned at Broken Hill in the early evening, where there is to be another coach tour. I go to the apple-green cafe-bar carriage, known officially as Matilda's Restaurant, though I can't see any sign of a Matilda and 'restaurant' may be stretching it a bit.

  We are still in the outskirts of Adelaide. Heaps of cargo containers, streams with dumped shopping trolleys, warehouses covered with graffiti and scaffolding yards gradually fade away. Verdant countryside opens up. I order a coffee so I'm 'kosher' and before long get talking to Wicks, who tells me he used to work as a stand-up comedian.

  'Eye contact, it's very important,' he says, explaining his approach to his welcoming speech.

  I ask him if red class can get unruly.

  'There has been trouble in the past,' he says. 'I pride myself on the fact that I don't chuck people off. Eye contact. And let them vent. That's what's important.'

  'You've never chucked anyone off ever?'

  Wicks thinks for a moment and then relates a story of a man he found shooting up heroin in the toilet: 'He said, "Look, I take my drugs, man." I said, "Look, I've got kids in there." We were at Manguri and the police from Coober Pedy came to take him.'

  I ask him about Australian trainspotters. 'Do such people exist?'

  'We call them train gunzels. A gunzel is a person who is really stuck on one thing. In Sydney you get guys on the platforms. This carriage here is the CDF924 – that's the number for Matilda's Restaurant. The guys on the platform will say, "Oh, I haven't seen that for a while." There's one station, Midland, near Perth, where you will always see them. In fourteen years working here, always at least two of them.'

  'Have you ever had gunzels on board?'

  'Oh yeah. I had a guy who went up to Alice Springs and Darwin. He'd sit there and take pictures and notes on every train we crossed and every station. Then he came back and did it all again.'

  Wicks leaves. Remaining kosher, I buy a chicken wrap. Long emerald fields open up. An old-timer near me says, 'There's a wind down the coast.' I have no idea how he can tell.

  I see a couple of kangaroos in the far distance. They look like fox-coloured traffic cones. Beyond a wind farm with 43.2-metre blades – as we are informed by a speaker announcement – we turn at Crystal Brook. The train begins to rise through arid rolling landscape populated by dirty sheep. An old-timer joins the other old-timer and they begin to drink Carlton beers. A neighbour claims she saw a wedge-tailed eagle; in which case I did too, as I saw the same bird. Another speaker announcement begins and someone rambles on sentimentally about the outback: 'Distance, space, time… until you actually get out there and experience it… when I get out there I can feel my emotions change.' Not long afterwards, we roll into Broken Hill.

  Broken Hill is a mining town famous for its lead and zinc deposits: the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, as it once was, merged in 2001 with another company to form BHP Billiton, the world's biggest mining company. Light is fading rapidly, it's almost 6 p.m., and I cannot face another coach tour in the dark – or the possibility of mixing with gold-class foes. So I decide, in true Australian style, to go walkabout.

  The mining town is eerie in the early evening. Empty streets are lined with ghostly, late-nineteenth-century, red-brick buildings with corrugated roofs and ornate veranda-balconies. I look into a deserted bar connected to the – sadly closed – Night Train nightclub. It would have been excellent to have had a drink at the Night Train nightclub. I take in the ornate stuccoed facade of the

  1905 town hall; the first proper development in the area around Broken Hill began in 1883 when silver was discovered in nearby Silverton. I walk on, along Argent Street, past the Barrier Social Democratic Club (where folk are queuing for its Tuesday Steak Night amid madly-flashing pokie fruit machines), and come to the target of my stroll: the Palace Hotel. This big corner hotel, dating from 1889, has a unusual history as it featured heavily in the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which is all about the unlikely subject of drag queens in the outback. Not entirely sure what's coming next, I enter and discover a tall reception with bright murals depicting bucolic scenes, mounted stuffed birds and cabinets displaying leopard-print high heels. Further inside is a pool table, a bar and no sign of drag queens. I order a beer and a barmaid says that Priscilla is one of the biggest-grossing Australian films of all time: 'The film is iconic. It was successful because it's got heart, a very human heart. It's about more than queens in the outback. It's a human story that was very timely, especially so soon after AIDS.' A pamphlet on the bar advertises a Broken Heel Festival to be held at the hotel later in the year. Its motto? 'Life in the outback is never a drag.'

  All quite unexpected, as is the fact that Broken Hill lays claim to being the scene of the 'only enemy attack on Australian soil in the First World War'. According to a tourist booklet I pick up at the Palace Hotel, a train bound for nearby Silverton was 'fired upon by an ice-cream cart flying the Turkish flag'. This was shortly before Anzac troops joined the fight against the Turks at Gallipoli.

  Our train rolls on through the night, rising into hills. I manage to sleep well enough in red class, waking to see a tangerine sky. Brown cows munch grass in dew-covered fields. I enjoy a GordonRamsay-quality Great Australian Breakfast, sitting near a wildlooking Asian man wearing camouflage-style clothes and holding a plastic knife and fork upside down as chopsticks to eat his bacon and eggs. Lithgow and Bathurst flash by and we ascend through the spectacular Blue Mountains to Katoomba, where we are 3,336 feet above sea level. The Asian man starts making awful spitting sounds. We descend from the mountains.

  A tattooed man behind me tells his tattooed girlfriend/female companion that 'neo-masculinity is revealing the true nature of women… with the rise of metrosexuals, women who have been sleeping with bad boys are looking for other options… new metrosexual men are manipulating their techniques to attract women: sophisticated techniques… nice guys have no luck, women are all on the game and they get money easy – they've got more money than guys… blokes have to work hard for a living…' And so on and so on, nonsensically, as we enter the capital of New South Wales.

  'Sydney: what a dump,' says the tattooed man.

  'Along the railway track it doesn't look so good,' his tattooed girlfriend/companion replies. She has not previously got a word in edgeways.

  We pass graffiti-covered walls and a platform with a long double-decker commuter train, and pull in to Sydney Central station. It is 11:20. Not bad, just 13 minutes late. We've travelled quite a way – and the Indian Pacific has been quite a ride. I fetch my bag from the luggage van and slip into the streets of Sydney.

  I have a plane to catch to another famous harbour city, where I'm about to take the third of my trio of transcontinental trains.

  One final point: despite several predictions to the contrary made by fellow passengers on the Indian Pacific, the English cricket team went on to beat Australia in the Ashes of 2015. The BBC headline put it this way: ENGLAND HAMMER AUSTRALIA TO REGAIN THE URN. After the defeat, the Australia
n cricket captain Michael Clarke announced his retirement from Test cricket and said, 'it's not for want of trying, but the boys have been beaten by a better side'.

  I'm sure the Position A crew will be pleased to be reminded of that.

  9

  AMERICA: TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES (MAINLY TRAINS)

  IF YOU PUT 'excited train guy, New York' into the YouTube search box, you're soon treated to an insight into what trains mean to (some) Americans. In the States, people with an excessive interest in trains – the equivalent of Britain's trainspotters or Australia's gunzels – are known as 'foamers'. This is because, it is said, they foam at the mouth when they see a particularly wonderful or interesting train.

  The subtitle of the YouTube film is: 'Crazy foamer in North Creek at the Saratoga and North Creek Railway'. The film has had more than 3.4 million views at the time of watching. This, I notice, is considerably more than President Obama's latest State of the Union address in which the American head of state lays out his vision for his final two years in office. More than double the number, in fact. In case this marvellous train lover's clip is ever wiped from the online world, however, I'll describe what happens here.