Vintage train journey on Southern Aurora tours NSW’s golden west
A vintage train journey takes passengers on a nostalgic trip through regional NSW.
Anyone willing to sleep in a couchette must be an interesting person, don’t you think,” says Wendy Castleden. The Margaret River artist, who has traversed the country in an electric car with husband Bill over nine days to board a vintage sleeper train in NSW’s Blue Mountains, is among the interesting people aboard the very interesting Aurora Australis.
We’re not sleeping in couchettes exactly, those basic padded bunks with varying degrees of privacy. Rather, we’re in sleeper compartments. As British train expert The Man in Seat 61 gushes, “A sleeper is the most civilised, comfortable and romantic way to travel”. And the Aurora Australis, with its dinky original fittings and retro vibe, has romance in spades.
If the train’s name or looks ring a bell, that’s because it played a pivotal role in Australian rail history as the Southern Aurora. Between 1962 and 1986, it shuttled between Sydney and Melbourne as a luxury overnight passenger service. It started the run after the standard-gauge line between Wodonga and Melbourne was completed, removing the need for passengers to change trains at the border. Its early success didn’t last. Air and road competition, along with rising costs, crushed its viability. The Southern Aurora’s run ended in 1986 when it merged with another rail service. Eventually, most carriages went to rail preservation groups.
When one of those groups went into receivership, the languishing carriages caught the eye of Simon Mitchell, a long-time train enthusiast (or gunzel). In 2017, he snapped up 16 worse-for-wear carriages. Together with partner Danielle Smith and an army of paid helpers, he started the expensive process of restoration that included scrubbing away layers of diesel soot and grime. “Buying them’s cheap – that’s not the issue – but to get them rolling again? The total’s about $300,000 per carriage,” says Mitchell, who founded Vintage Rail Journeys with Smith. The pair’s love of the 1960s extends to their home, an ex-guvvie (government-owned house) in Canberra.
Some of the Aurora’s stainless-steel carriages, with their distinctive fluted sides, feature twinettes: double-occupancy rooms with an upper and lower bunk, fold-down metal toilet (quite an experience if you’ve never seen one before) and shower. Other carriages are devoted to roomettes. These small angled rooms, with a door, basin, chair and fold-down bed, all face an atmospheric zig-zag corridor, with communal modern bathrooms at one end. After the Castledens demonstrate the dexterity needed to climb a tiny ladder and twist on to a twinette’s upper bunk, I realise why roomettes are popular.
We’re all getting to know each other – or at least, the passengers at our end of the train – as we travel around regional NSW on the five-day Golden West Rail Tour. The train is so long, 412m, to be exact, we’re effectively divided in half. We’re assigned to the closest of two dining rooms and two lounge cars, which means the entire train rarely mingles (although I cross over mid-journey to experience the other side’s intense trivia session).
From Katoomba, we slither down the backside of the Blue Mountains, passing bushfire-ravaged trees sprouting new growth, bound for Bathurst. Many of our guest attendants, who show us how to work the bits and bobs in our compartments, are stood-down Qantas staff. Although Mitchell is at pains to emphasise the train is vintage rather than luxury, the level of service is such it feels like I’m travelling business-class for five days.
Once in Australia’s first inland settlement, I race up Keppel St to Legall Patisserie for one of its delectable lemon tarts, making it back to board a coach to Mayfield Garden (the mad dash was worth it). We’re shadowed over the five days by a Flxible Clipper 29-passenger bus, imported from the US by Sir Reg Ansett in 1947, so I figure there’s a back-up plan for reaching the botanical wonderland a half-hour drive out of town. It’s one of four times a year the entire property is open but there’s only enough time to see a fraction of its beauty.
As we continue to Orange, it’s clear we’re being papped. Photographers bounce out of vehicles alongside the tracks to snap a few golden-hour shots before continuing their chase. Word is out that the Aurora Australis is on the move. Upon arrival, we enjoy the first of many meals that showcase the region’s fare: slow-cooked Cowra lamb shanks, Gilgandra chicken, Borenore strawberries with cream, Canobolas scrambled eggs with Trunkey Creek bacon, pancakes with Dubbo honey. Excellent regional wines are sold at the bar.
Our route will take us as far north as Werris Creek, near Tamworth, where Angelina Jolie caused a stir in 2013 when she used the railway station (home to the impressive Rail Journeys Museum) as a backdrop for her wartime film Unbroken. From here, we angle back towards Sydney via the Hunter Valley and Hawkesbury regions. At times, we stop because freight trains have priority. “Rail is the most constrained form of transport you can get,” says Mitchell. “There’s one line in most cases, particularly in regional NSW. The Golden West (route) is pretty good because, sadly, there’s not much freight traffic while the Riverina has a lot more. That’s a good thing because in our view we need to get more freight off the roads and on to rail.”
Other spanners can be thrown in the works, as we discover in Dunedoo. A mechanical issue stalls us so, instead of stabling in Gulgong, we overnight next to a silo painted with the racehorse Winx, straddled by Dunedoo-born jockey Hugh Bowman. Coaches will instead take us to Gulgong to inspect attractions such as the Prince of Wales Opera House where Dame Nellie Melba once sang. Logistics become a hot topic of conversation among passengers. “One of the guests actually said, ‘Can we pass the hat around for that?’” Mitchell later says of the emergency coach hire, shaking his head in wonder.
It’s that kind of journey. Mitchell and Smith don’t have hospitality backgrounds – he’s a former accountant, she was a public servant – yet they endear themselves in many ways. We arrive back from Gulgong, for instance, to see they’ve just given a passing family with a train-mad son a private train tour. As we file back aboard from Dunedoo’s tiny, overgrown platform, Mitchell uses everyone’s names as he tells them to turn left or right to reach their compartments. It’s one of the reasons passengers shower them with kindnesses, which range from a box of Hunter Valley thank-you chocolates to hand-stitched train-themed quilts and even offering the use of holiday homes. “I don’t really know what’s going on but I’m grateful,” Smith says, tearing up as she details these unexpected acts.
Mitchell says: “I think they see you’ve got to be crazy to do something like this, and they’re right. People have got to take risks to make new stuff happen. You’ve got a moving 136-bed hotel, you’ve got two 48-seat restaurants and two 48-seat bars. There are just huge challenges every step of the way (but) this thing is a part of NSW and Victoria’s history. It’s an icon.”
In the know
In 2021, the Golden West Rail Tour will run from September 8-12 and 22-26, and November 10-14. The Riverina Rail Tour will run from October 6-10 and 20-24. Rail tours cost $3995 a person (twin-share or single), rising to $4250 a person in 2022.
Katrina Lobley was a guest of Vintage Rail Journeys.
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