Southbound again. Train 32 slips out of Brisbane’s Roma Street at 6am, bound for Sydney Central; we joined it at Kempsey, already some six hours into its run. It travels single-track for most of the way, so speed is not its strong suit — every so often we’d sit at a passing loop, waiting for a northbound service or a freight train to ease past. Patience was tested.
The route threads through Wauchope, Kendall, Taree, Wingham, Gloucester, Dungog, Maitland, Broadmeadow, Wyong, Gosford, Hornsby and Strathfield before Central. We stepped off at Hornsby and picked up a suburban train to Epping to finish the journey.
Calling it an express takes some nerve — fast it is not. Comfortable, though, it quietly is: reclining seats, curtains, a certain faded dignity. Mobile signal, on the other hand, was essentially fictional; no Wi-Fi, no bars, just you and your thoughts until the coverage reappears around Maitland.
What the train does serve, in abundance, is countryside. Rural New South Wales unrolls for hours — forests, mountains, valleys, over and over. The first stretch is fairly uniform, but south of Wingham it turns beautiful: late-afternoon light falling across wide green valleys with forested hills behind. And from Gosford it changes gear entirely, the line snaking along the water, diving through tunnels, crossing the Hawkesbury River and easing into greater Sydney like something from a travel film. That stretch alone earns the extra hours over the highway.
Here’s the irony of that unhurried ride. This is an XPT — an “eXpress Passenger Train,” built from the design of Britain’s InterCity 125 — and it holds the Australian rail speed record, 193 km/h, set on a test run in 1992. The trains can fly; it’s the ageing single-track line, not the train, that keeps them ambling through the valleys.
Further reading: The XPT and Australia’s rail speed record