For 478 kilometres across the Nullarbor Plain the railway between Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie does not turn once. It does not need to. What surprises most travellers is that the line is not level either: the world's longest stretch of straight railway rises and dips with the land, a dead-straight line on the map that is anything but flat on the ground.
That straight is the most famous fact about the Trans-Australian Railway, but it is also the least interesting. Behind it sits a political bargain made at Federation, a construction effort carried out with camels and hand tools during the First World War, and a line of tiny railway settlements that depended for eight decades on a single provisions train. The straight is simply what happens when engineers meet a landscape that offers them no reason to bend.
A railway promised as the price of Federation
The Trans-Australian Railway began as a political promise, not an engineering ambition. When the colonies federated in 1901, Western Australia was the most reluctant partner. Its goldfields were booming, and the only practical way to reach Adelaide or Melbourne was by sea. A railway across the south of the continent was offered as part of the agreement that brought the west into the Commonwealth.
Delivering it took a decade. A preliminary survey was made in 1901 and a full survey across the desert followed in 1908. The enabling legislation passed the federal parliament in December 1911, and on 14 September 1912 the Governor-General, Lord Denman, turned the first sod at Port Augusta. Construction then proceeded from both ends at once: westward from Port Augusta and eastward from Kalgoorlie, which had been connected to Perth by rail since 1896.
A treeless plain with a Latin name
The country between the two railheads is the Nullarbor, and its name is often assumed to be Aboriginal. It is not. It is schoolroom Latin, from nulla arbor, meaning "no tree", and was coined by the surveyor Edmund Delisser during his expeditions in the 1860s. Sources disagree on the year: some date the naming to 1865, most to 1866, and one account attaches it to his border survey of 1867.
The second common assumption is that the Nullarbor is a sand desert. It is in fact an enormous slab of limestone, raised from the sea floor over millions of years and riddled with caves, sinkholes and blowholes. Estimates of its extent range from about 190,000 to 250,000 square kilometres, depending on where the boundary is drawn, which makes it one of the largest karst landscapes on earth. At its southern edge it ends abruptly at the Bunda Cliffs above the Great Australian Bight. For railway builders it meant firm ground, little relief and almost no surface water.
Water, camels and two and a half miles a day
Water was the defining problem of the construction. There were no roads and no settlements, and the early survey and earthworks relied on pack camels, the same animals whose handlers are remembered in the name of the Ghan, as told in our piece on why the Ghan is named after the Afghan cameleers. Covered dams were built along the route to store water for the steam locomotives, and the permanent waterhole at Ooldea, first used by a European expedition when Ernest Giles passed through in 1875, became one of the most important camps on the line.
Once the supply chain was established the pace was remarkable. At its peak the work laid up to two and a half miles of track a day, and in one calendar year 442 miles were completed. The estimated cost of the whole line was a little over four million pounds.
Less than a metre apart at Ooldea
The two construction gangs met near Ooldea at 1.45 pm on 17 October 1917, roughly 697 kilometres from Port Augusta and 995 kilometres from Kalgoorlie. The surveying had been so precise that, according to the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, the two ends were less than a metre apart on a north-south line when they converged. The railway was officially opened on 22 October 1917, and the first eastbound passenger train left Kalgoorlie on 25 October.
The finished line is usually given as 1,051 miles, or about 1,692 kilometres, although published figures range from 1,691 to 1,711 kilometres depending on the endpoints and whether later realignments are counted. It was built to the 1,435 mm standard gauge, which created an awkward irony: at both ends it met narrower state systems, so passengers crossing the continent still had to change trains.
- 1901 – Federation; preliminary survey of the route
- 1908 – full survey across the desert
- 14 September 1912 – first sod turned at Port Augusta
- 1915 – the Tea and Sugar provisions train begins running
- 17 October 1917 – the two railheads meet near Ooldea
- 22 October 1917 – official opening
- 23 February 1970 – the first Indian Pacific leaves Sydney for Perth
- 30 August 1996 – the last Tea and Sugar run
The 297 miles that never bend
The straight itself runs for 478 kilometres, or 297 miles, from Mile 496, between Nurina and Loongana in Western Australia, to Mile 793, between Ooldea and Watson in South Australia. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest railway straight in the world, and the more precise figure sometimes quoted is 478.193 kilometres. What the record does not convey is the gradient. The track follows the gentle undulations of the limestone, so the view from the rear of a train is not a vanishing point on a billiard table but a ruler-straight line rising and falling over the horizon.
The straight is not, as is sometimes suggested, the product of a deliberate attempt at a record. It is the logical outcome of a plain with no rivers to bridge, no ranges to skirt and no towns to serve. The railway created its own settlements instead: small sidings named after prime ministers, such as Cook, Hughes, Deakin and Fisher, which housed the fettlers, locomotive crews and their families who kept the line running.
The Tea and Sugar and the towns it fed
Those settlements had no road connection, so everything arrived by rail. From 1915, first for the construction camps and then for the railway families, the Commonwealth Railways ran a dedicated provisions service known as the Tea and Sugar. It carried groceries and livestock with its own butcher on board, a car in which families could watch films while the train stood in the siding, and a welfare car staffed by a nurse. The last Tea and Sugar ran on 30 August 1996.
Most of the sidings have since emptied. Cook, named after the prime minister Joseph Cook and once a proper railway town with a hospital, a primary school, a golf course and a swimming pool, survives as a refuelling and watering stop with only a caretaker presence. It has long been the place where passenger trains pause in the middle of the plain.
Crossing the Nullarbor today
The break of gauge was finally removed when the lines in South Australia and Western Australia were converted to standard gauge in the late 1960s. On 23 February 1970 the first through train left Sydney, and when it reached Perth on 26 February it was greeted by a crowd variously reported as more than 10,000 and around 12,000. It was named for the two oceans it joined, and the Indian Pacific remains the way to experience the Nullarbor straight from a sleeping compartment, with the long run across the plain forming the heart of the journey between Sydney, Adelaide and Perth.
For travellers who want to understand the continent by rail, the natural companion is the north-south crossing of the Ghan through Alice Springs to Darwin. Our guide to Australia by luxury train sets the two side by side, and the Nullarbor earns its place among the world's greatest luxury train journeys. More routes are collected on our trains page, and further rail history in the journal.
