Arriving back at Seymour after travelling by train from Brisbane, we were greeted at the ticket office with the comment: “You two look terrible”.
No offence was meant and none was taken, rather it was just an honest appraisal from the fellow behind the counter.
My wife and I were not surprised by the assessment as we had just traveled from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast via Brisbane and Sydney on what was a two-day almost sleepless adventure.
The local train trip from the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane was smooth, cool and relatively easy.
However, the complications began upon arrival at Brisbane’s Roma St station, which is in the early stages of serious renovation and subsequently finding our connection to Sydney was not simple.
Having checked in for our journey to Seymour that was still about 90 minutes from leaving and about to settle at a rather second-rate coffee shop to fill in the time, the kindness of strangers intervened when a railway worker told us of an easily accessible nearby cafe that was bright, airy, cool and transported us into a whole different world.
But on leaving that oasis, all changed, or at least began to change.
The planned bus trip from Brisbane to Casino in northern New South Wales was as expected (why it’s a bus and not a train is not clear to me), but then the truly challenging stuff started.
The XPT, a train that was celebrated as the “latest and greatest” when it was launched in the early eighties, as it probably was then, has not changed much since being introduced.
The tracks, vital to the stability and smoothness of the ride, have deteriorated decidedly as the operators reluctantly spend to keep the rail network functioning, just.
However, while the rail is the unquestioned poor cousin, public money, probably millions if not billions of dollars, is ploughed into creating a grand highway infrastructure up and down the east coast.
The XPT is invariably late (yes, I know that in Europe and Japan their arrival and departures are second-perfect) and so we were late on arrival in Sydney, not just a few minutes, but a whole hour, meaning our connection to Seymour had left without us, despite assurances that wouldn’t happen.
“Not to worry" they assured us as we struggled with our luggage through the “Elvises” and their cohort pouring onto the Parkes Elvis train that was about to leave for that annual festival.
Just 10 of us has missed our connection and after some confusion we were all loaded on to a modern 50-seater coach and left Sydney’s Central Station with the goal of catching the train at Cootamundra - the intercept was completed.
The passengers whose destination it was waved goodbye and we took up our seats on the XPT.
The journey from Cootamundra to Seymour was without incident and after nearly two days, we were back on Victorian soil and now it was just an hour or so back to Shepparton.
It was unquestionably an arduous journey - my wife said “never again” - but as mentioned earlier, it shouldn’t be like that and if we are serious about tackling the climate crisis, it simply can’t be.
We have been misled and convinced by powerful economic interests that we should all have our own mode of transport, a frightfully expensive privately-owned car when our movement needs can be answered equally as well and most certainly in a more energy-efficient way with a sophisticated, in every sense, public transport system.
Last week’s derailment of the Sydney to Melbourne XPT, killing two people, will lead, I’m sure, to much arm waving, finger pointing and accusations about the safety of train travel, ignoring the reality of many more road deaths each year.
8°C