The Nullabor & Western Australia

The Nullabor Plain is part of the area of flat, treeless, arid country of southern Australia. located on the Great Australian Bight coast with the Victoria desert to its north. It is the world's largest single piece of limestone and occupies an area of about 200,000 square kilometres (77,000 sq mi). At its widest point, it stretches about 1,100 kilometres (684 mi) from east to west between South Australia & Western Australia.
I got that bit above from Wikipedia........and on this route, it has the longest straight stretch of railway track....478klms......no bends, no curves, just straight track. I find that amazing....someone obviously had a very accurate ruler!!

From that description, you'd think it would be boring.....flat, treeless etc. I reckon there's always something of interest anywhere if you care to look for it. 

Just inside the South Australian border is the town (?) of Cook. It used to have about 50 inhabitants, not bad for the Nullabor, and all had something to do with the railway, but since it was privatised in 1997, all but 5 people have moved away and the town is abandoned. Now the train stops there twice a week to refuel and to offer accomodation to the train drivers. We stopped there for about 1/2 an hour, long enough to have a wander around the abandoned buildings. One of the women who lives there said she grew up there as a child, said she doesn't get lonely, has her husband & child and her parents. The child does her education by the School of the Air, as do a lot of isolated kids in outback Australia. They'd want to have good generators, it gets to about 48 deg,in the summer, but being in the desert, it drops 15 or 20 deg in the evening !! Not my cup of tea, but I guess someone has to do the job and good on them.

 Cook swimming pool.....

abandoned buildings......I think some of these used to be the school, hospital & pub

 the old jail cells

 Cook

Then we headed off again toward Kalgoorlie in WA, passing through lots of interesting little sidings, all with a story to tell. The train does a commentary when we are approaching something of interest, be it a siding, a marker or an outback station and generally slows so we can see what they are talking about. One such place is Forrest just over the WA border. It boasts the largest runways outside of any Australian capital city and was originally an overnight stop on the first scheduled flights from Perth to Adelaide. They're still used today, for the RAAF, the Flying Doctor any any light aircraft that want to use them.

Next up is Rawlinna. The town no longer exists but the sheep station is one of those gobsmacking outback Australia stations, the size of which is mind blowing. It's located 400km east of Kalgoorlie and joins the railway line and the Eyre Highway with a total area of approximately 2.5 million acres. Apparently it can take up to 8 hours to locate and muster the sheep with the aid of motorbikes and light aircraft and that's just ONE paddock!!!!

Next stop Kalgoorlie........it was late when we arrived here, so again a brisk walk in the fresh air was in order. Kalgoorlie is the centre of WA's gold mining industry, it's situated on the western border of the Nullabor Plain and is a typical mining town. It has about 27,000 residents and is about 570 klms north east of Perth. A lot of mining towns in Australia have "fly in- fly out" workers, but Kalgoorlie doesn't allow that, which is good for the towns diversity and economy. In the early days it was known for it's red light district as much as its mining.....the mining's still there, not sure about the red lights!!

Next stop Perth.........