City Circle tram, Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne largely moves on steel wheels on steel rails.  It’s certainly the only city in Australia, and arguably one of the few in the world, which still runs a complete, traditional street tramway system.  This isn’t an isolated route with heritage overtones, like Blackpool or Adelaide, or even a vestige like Boston or Rome;  this is a full-on, in-yer-face tram system, with 27 routes covering most of the city, running single-deck vehicles of different dates and sizes up to the very latest 21st-century sophisticated models, operating with very cheap fares and some free travel.  Buses, I eventually noticed, are a rarity.

The suburban rail system is also ubiquitous.  There are some places in the city-centre (which the locals call the Central Business District, or CBD, rather like Chicago’s Loop) where it’s possible – with trams screeching round tight curves and trains rumbling overhead on viaducts – to imagine you’re sitting in the midst of someone’s gigantic train set.  There is even a compact version of London’s Circle Line, circumambulating the CBD sub-surface between five stations.

On Sunday I could travel the entire network – trams, trains and buses if I could find any – for the price of a Sunday Saver ticket, A$3.10 [less than £2];  on Monday the same facility for Zone 1, which extends as far as a visitor would reasonably need, cost A$6.80 [around £4.25].  Notices on the trams and tram stops showed that Christmas Day travel was free of charge, and on New Year’s Eve trams ran throughout the night until the New Year’s Day timetable began.

One consequence of the plethora of tram tracks is that Melbourne motorists perform a manoeuvre called a “hook turn” to ensure trams have priority at green lights.  To turn right at a tramway crossing (the Australians drive on the left), it’s necessary to move into the left-hand lane on the crossing, wait until all traffic has passed by and then make a tight right turn just as the lights change.  I repeatedly saw this operation completed with skill and grace, but I think I’d be a wimp and take three left turns round the block rather than put myself in such a situation.

The ideal way to orientate in Melbourne is by means of the free circular tram service which circumscribes the CBD, following almost exactly the route of the underground line, with a dogleg spur to the Waterfront City on the redeveloped Docklands.  This is operated by distinctive heritage trams, rugged streetcars with an American appearance.  There is a recorded commentary and, unlike visitor tours in many places, trams run in both directions so it’s easy to hop backwards and forwards between sites.

The CBD is an elongated oblong:  it’s a comfortable stroll across the short axis, but quite a tramp along the long axis from Southern Cross Station to the Parliament House.  The City Circle tram, with its commentary, makes it much easier to visit the city-centre sites, such as the Parliament House of Victoria, the Old Treasury (now the City Museum), the Old Melbourne Gaol and the Victorian Arts Centre.  I used it to visit Melbourne’s cathedrals, both impressive, the Anglican St Paul’s and the Roman Catholic St Patrick’s.

The only place I ate in Melbourne CBD was a delight.  Federici is attached to the Princess Theatre, opposite the Parliament House, and offers bistro-style food at all hours.  I missed the opportunity to see Jersey Boys at the Princess, because I had a prior engagement with the Colonial Tramcar Restaurant.

Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia

The Adelaide cab-driver pointed out, as he took me to the Parkland rail terminal, that there are quicker ways to Melbourne, but travelling on The Overland, the train that leaves Adelaide at breakfast time and makes it into Melbourne 10½ hours later, was part of my intention of seeing how big Australia is.

I travelled Red Premier class, which provides comfortable seating adjacent to the buffet car and a limited, rather relaxed trolley service.  Food is marginally more generous but no more ambitious than an average British rail company:  there was a customer stampede in late afternoon when the remaining pies were sold off at $2 [around £1.25] each.

The most interesting part of the journey from Adelaide is the first, because threading the line through the Adelaide Hills was clearly an engineering challenge.  The huge American-style rolling stock screeches round tight curves, over viaducts and through tunnels, and there are repeated views of the sea as the line climbs towards its summit at Mount Lofty.  At Mount Lofty station (where, apparently, you can hire self-catering apartments and train-spot to your heart’s content – http://www.mlrs.com.au), the line visibly dips down-grade and heads off into endless plains of farmland, the breadbasket of Australia.

For the remaining nine hours of the trip the train coasts through a gentle landscape, sometimes hilly and rather like southern England, often extensive flat plains stretching to the horizon or to distant hills.  There were few visual events on the journey – crossing the Murray River on a high viaduct with the original rail bridge, now used as a road, alongside, a few large towns like Ararat and Geelong.

At the start of the journey the train captain encouraged passengers to introduce themselves and talk to each other.  Imagine a British train manager suggesting such a thing!  That would really get the conversation going on the morning commute from East Grinstead.

There was an intermittent commentary, which I imagine was informative.  The commentator was BBC World Service in comparison to The Goons on The Ghan, but he read at breakneck speed, reminding me of the apocryphal Nancy Reagan story, where she was asked if she understood poor people and replied, “Yes, if they speak slowly.”

The man in the seat opposite at one point asked if I was bored with the landscape yet.  I said that I was never bored by landscape:  occasionally I dozed off, but I never opened the paperback I’d brought.

At last the train crawls into Melbourne, to the Southern Cross station, a spectacular steel tent draping a curvy roof over the platforms.  Stepping out on to Spencer Street gives an immediate impression of 1950s Glasgow – big, impressive buildings, a grid street plan and trams rattling across right-angled crossings.  The taxi-driver declined my fare, pointing to my hotel which was within sight.

The Indian Pacific: lounge car (2009)

The Indian Pacific is a serious train [http://www.gsr.com.au/site/indian_pacific.jsp].  For me, it’s the only way to see how big Australia is.  Starting from Perth at midday Wednesday, it takes nearly two days – two lunches, two dinners, two nights’ sleep, and one-and-a-half breakfasts (the latter a doggy-bag before disembarking at Adelaide).  For the even more serious-minded, it continues via Broken Hill to Sydney.

The line from Perth to Adelaide, or more specifically the section from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta, has major historical significance:  its construction clinched the deal by which Western Australia agreed to join the Commonwealth of Australia in 1900.  Without that deal Western Australia would have remained for the time being a British colony and would, very probably, have achieved independence like New Zealand.  (There was a point in the 1890s when New Zealand considered amalgamating with Australia, but the New Zealanders thought better of it.)

The statistics are awesome – 4,325 kilometres (2,687½ miles) for the full run from Perth to Sydney, crossing two time-zones, including the longest stretch of straight railway track (478 kilometres; 297 miles) in the world.

The train itself is awesome – 29 vehicles, including power cars, crew cars, baggage car and motor-rail vehicles, 771 metres (843 yards) long, 1,375 tonnes, drawn by one extremely powerful diesel locomotive – crawling its way across the endless landscape, much of the time on single track, pausing at passing places to make room for enormous freight trains.

It’s not cheap.  The basic version is Red Service – coach-style seating, by the look of it not dissimilar to basic Amtrak, in which people sit for days on end.  You see Red passengers boarding very sensibly carrying pillows.  There are also Red sleeper compartments.  The next version up is Gold Service – your own compartment, loos and showers at the end of the carriage, a comfortable bar car and a quite opulent dining car with all meals included.  There is something called Platinum Service, newly introduced with spare vehicles from the Ghan route:  apparently, the compartments are more roomy, with en-suite facilities.

On board Gold class, the single compartment is, rather like the interior of an airliner, a masterpiece of compact planning.  Even the wash-basin folds away.  The wardrobe, such as it is, is all of three inches wide;  the bed, of course, folds down;  the window-blinds sit within the double-glazed unit, controlled by an ingenious winding handle.  An odd consequence of the layout of the single compartments is that the central corridor is literally sinuous:  it curves from side to side.  Other coaches with double-bunk compartments have the customary layout with the corridor down one side.

There can be no better way to appreciate the vastness and emptiness of this great continent, without going to the lengths of driving for days on end, as Bill Bryson did in researching his excellent book, Down Under (2000).

I sat for the first hour or so, watching the route out through suburban Greater Perth, leaving behind the electric commuter trains, heading into the hills.  I chose to watch our way through an anonymous valley, with an accommodation road snaking alongside the track:  it was a good twenty minutes before I spotted any sign of life – a track-maintenance crew with their pick-up miles from anywhere.

Through a lunchtime glass of beer, an introductory presentation with a free glass of champagne, an interminable wait for second sitting and lunch itself, the landscape gradually opened out, became virtual desert, then became more verdant, hour after hour, mile upon mile.

As the first afternoon wore on, the train occasionally passed vast grain silos, then pastures with surprisingly purposeful-looking sheep, then monotonous low scrub, then patchy woodland.  For anyone used to watching rail journeys in Europe, this is indeed slow-motion travelling, despite the respectable speed of the train.  For hours on end there are no valleys, so no bridges or tunnels, hardly a cutting and never a viaduct.  Where there were cuttings, the rock varied in colour from pale grey to gunmetal to rust;  elsewhere the soil might be mustard or ochre.  That’s all there was to look at:  it was oddly restful.

Sometimes the trackside dirt road was punctuated by a gate, with the name of a ranch (which the Australians call a station) hidden beyond the horizon.  The lifestyle out here is a world away from the experience of most Europeans.  In all but the remotest corners of the British Isles, it’s a matter of choice not to go window-shopping, not to go the theatre or a big-league sporting event;  in populous regions education, health services, social life, variety is effectively on tap.  Living in rural Australia involves a direct reversal of these expectations.  These people must have particular qualities of self-reliance, initiative, stamina and determination.

The evening ended, after a convivial dinner, with a ludicrous but informative tour of the gold-mining twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the middle of the night, peering at nineteenth-century hotels and public buildings, viewing the huge floodlit Superpit on the outskirts of town and examining the remaining, innocuous-looking brothels on Hay Street.  The coach-driver was straight from Central Casting – began each stage of the journey with the expression “Okey-doke”, and all of his sentences? Went up at the end? Like they do in Australia?  He knew what he was talking about, and went out of his way to make sure we saw as much as we could in the circumstances.

And so, as they say, to bed…