AS THE FLOODLIGHTS of Albury station breach the perimeters of my sleep mask, I wonder, and not for the first time, if taking the overnight XPT train to see grandma was a good idea. We’re roughly 280 kilometres southwest of Sydney, it’s midnight, and this blinding border stop will take 20 minutes, for the Victorian crew to clock off and the New South Wales staff to take over. Passengers also get on and off, opening the sliding partition to the vestibule more times than is necessary and banging their luggage on every possible surface.
My child easily sleeps through this. At seven-and-a-half, she’s small and bendy enough to curl up sideways along our seats. Meanwhile, I am being periodically kneed by her in my ribs and spleen, and have given up on getting any meaningful rest. We’re still around five hours from our stop: Moss Vale, in the pretty Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where her grandma retired a few years ago.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned about this trip—the XPT (one way from A$78.16 for adults, accompanying children 15 and under for A$1) is legendarily outdated. Many a newspaper journalist has bemoaned its clunky carriages and spongey seats, now more than 40 years old. The trip is bumpy, noisy and long (11 hours between termini), there are no power sockets, and there’s no WiFi. Why can’t we have high-speed trains like Europe? people ask in their online reviews.
Why would I, a sane person, knowingly opt for this train across this swath of Australia, instead of a smooth 90-minute flight from Melbourne to Sydney? The answer could be leg room, convenience or cost (a one-way first-class ticket is A$116 for an adult and A$1 for an accompanying child), but honestly, it’s because I find old and weird things charming, especially when it comes to trains. The 1980s design, the microwave meals in cardboard trays, the diesel smell, the fabric seats, the bumps and rattles, the liminal spaces of platforms and vestibules. Insomnia notwithstanding, it’s a vibe.
Travel like this won’t exist for much longer, I think, and not just because this train is being replaced in 2026. It’s more that surely these types of trips with my daughter will soon be things of the past. She might not have time to travel with me when she’s all grown up. Will she even want to? She definitely won’t be sleeping sideways across the seats for much longer. Will there be any place left on earth free from the distractions of WiFi, where you paint each other’s nails or play Uno to pass the time?
At some point after a place called Cootamundra I must have drifted off, because next thing I know twilight is turning the carriage light-blue. We’re meant to be pulling into Moss Vale in 15 minutes, but we’re still an hour away, having left Southern Cross terminus late. I’m glad, because otherwise it’d be too dark to see the view.
“Mum, mum! Kangaroos!!” The Southern Highlands sure is scenic. The region’s bush-farm beauty is clichéd: rolling fields, Heidelberg landscapes of hills and cows and stringybark eucalyptus. Wispy fog pooling in the valleys and eastern gray kangaroos nibbling on the grass. I teach my child the word “crepuscular,” which she can’t pronounce and definitely won’t remember.
Around 6 a.m. we clunk into Moss Vale, where my mum has been waiting with her takeaway half-strength McDonald’s coffee for at least an hour. She was never a passenger, always a driver, taking us on mother-daughter road trips up and down 1980s east-coast Australia, the same two cassette tapes playing for hours on end, a UBD Road Atlas of Australia instead of Google Maps. That kind of travel stopped existing, too.
A week later we go back home to Melbourne on the daytime XPT train. It’s by far a more enjoyable journey than the overnight version, mainly because there’s no expectation to get any sleep and you really don’t get tired of those countryside views. For 10 hours we do without WiFi, occupying ourselves with colouring, trips to the buffet car, cow- and sheep- spotting, and watching princess movies on my laptop. We get out and stretch our legs at Albury station, while the staff change over. We arrive at Southern Cross terminus at 6:30 p.m., where passengers are waiting to start their overnight trip up to Sydney.
People will no doubt be ecstatic when these old carriages clunk their last. The new rolling stock from Spain will be faster, more comfortable, more environmentally friendly, and have connectivity. Even I’ll probably be a frequent rider and wonder how I survived back in 2024, going 10 hours without emails, messages and social feeds. My child will be glued to Minecraft or TikTok or whatever the kids are glued to by then.
Til that time comes, I’m clinging to nostalgia. I’ve got a few more trips to grandma’s planned, on the XPT, an arthritic, diesel-powered clunker, frozen in the ’80s, with dated fabric chairs, no charging stations, and zero bars of WiFi. And also, for the time being, a girl small enough to curl up in the window seat and periodically kick me in the spleen.
Lede and hero image courtesy of Destination NSW.
The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
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