I was twelve years old the first time a train became a genuinely daily part of my life, catching the service from Albion Park to Wollongong and back again, five days a week, for high school. There was nothing remotely glamorous about it. Vinyl seats, the particular smell of a train carriage in summer, the same handful of familiar faces at the same stations every single morning. But there was something about it too, a rhythm, a small pocket of the day that belonged entirely to me, staring out the window at the same stretch of coastline going past, that I didn’t fully appreciate until decades later.
By Year 9, I’d graduated from passenger to employee, taking a summer job as a ticket collector at Albion Park station. The work itself was great fun, genuinely. What I remember most clearly, though, is opening my very first pay packet and discovering, with real and lasting indignation, that the government had already been in there before me. I was furious. I am, if I’m honest, still a little furious about it now, decades and several tax brackets later. That job taught me two things: that I loved being around trains, and that I would never entirely make peace with the concept of income tax.
What I couldn’t have known back then, rattling along that same short stretch of the Illawarra line, is that trains would end up taking me considerably further than Wollongong. Over the years since (five of them as editor of the Escape section in our Sunday newspapers), I’ve had the enormous privilege of riding some of the great train journeys of the world, and I’ve never once lost that particular, slightly childish thrill of feeling a platform slide away beneath you as a journey begins. Here are seven that have stayed with me.
There is nothing quite like watching your own country unspool beside you for four days and three nights, from the Blue Mountains through the endless, hypnotic flatness of the Nullarbor Plain, and on to the Western Australian coast. The Nullarbor crossing alone, the longest straight stretch of railway track on Earth, is worth the ticket price by itself. It’s a genuinely humbling way to understand just how big Australia actually is.
If the Indian Pacific shows you Australia’s width, The Ghan shows you its heart, running clean through the Red Centre via Alice Springs and Katherine. I still remember stepping off for an off-train excursion into the Outback under a sky so thick with stars it looked artificial, and thinking that no domestic flight could have ever given me that.
Glass-domed carriages, the Canadian Rockies rising directly outside the window, and genuinely attentive service that makes you feel thoroughly spoiled without a hint of pretension. This is daylight rail travel done at its absolute best, deliberately scheduled so you never miss the scenery to darkness.
There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about falling asleep in London and waking up in the Scottish Highlands, curtain drawn back to reveal mist rolling over the hills as you rattle toward Fort William or Inverness. It’s not the most luxurious sleeper train in the world, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. It feels like a proper, lived-in piece of railway history rather than a museum piece.
Yes, it’s exactly as glamorous as you’ve heard. Polished wood panelling, white-gloved service, a dining car that demands you dress for dinner. Riding it from London through to Venice feels less like transport and more like stepping directly into a novel, which is, of course, entirely the point.
Eight hours crossing 291 bridges and through 91 tunnels between Zermatt and St Moritz, with the Swiss Alps doing absolutely everything they can to steal your attention from your lunch. It moves slowly enough, by design, that you’re never left wishing you’d looked up a moment sooner.
The big one. Genuinely epic in scale, crossing seven time zones and thousands of kilometres of birch forest, steppe and Siberian wilderness. It is long, it is occasionally uncomfortable, and it remains one of the single most extraordinary things I have ever done. There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from several days with nothing to do but watch a continent go by.
I think what train travel gives you, more than any other form of transport, is time you’re not allowed to rush. You can’t hurry a train journey the way you can talk yourself into skipping the scenic route in a car, or numb yourself with a screen the way you might on a long-haul flight. You’re simply there, watching the world go past at exactly the pace it’s decided to reveal itself to you. That was true on the Illawarra line when I was twelve, furious about my first tax bill, and it’s remained true on every great railway I’ve been lucky enough to ride since.
If any of these have found their way onto your own bucket list, the team at Travel at 60 can help you plan the journey properly, from booking to the bits in between.
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