Epic rail: Going slow on Australia’s Great Southern train line

Ianthe Butt embarks on her first long-distance rail journey, exploring southeastern Australia aboard the country’s newest luxury train experience

The Great Southern train (Freedom Destinations)

I have a great affection for train journeys. My oldest school friends are the result of eight-minute-long South West Trains services between Woking and Guildford, unbreakable bonds forged over homework swaps and who-fancies-who chats. Travelling Bangkok to Chiang Mai on rickety trains as a backpacker in my twenties taught me the thrill of unhurried passage. A decade later, I enjoyed seeing London’s skyscrapers melt into the soft pistachio-greens of Oxfordshire through carriage windows on weekend escapes. But, despite this fondness, I’d never taken a ‘bucket list’ train trip.

Australia has form when it comes to legendary, lengthy rail journeys – indeed, pre-pandemic, both the BBC and ITV aired TV shows (fronted by rail nuts Michael Portillo and Griff Rhys Jones respectively) about the joy of Australian train travel. Most famous are two trans-continental trains – the 90-year-old Ghan, an outback adventure which covers the 1,851 miles between Darwin and Adelaide, and the 50-year-old Indian Pacific, a 2,704-mile coast-to-coast journey bookended by Sydney and Perth which cuts across the Mars-like Nullarbor Plain. The news that the operator behind them, Journey Beyond, were making it a hat-trick in 2019 with the launch of the Great Southern – a 1,800-mile luxury train journey running between Brisbane and Adelaide, with off-train excursions along the way – finally tempted me to take my first ever epic rail adventure.

Passengers can grab a drink in the bar onboard (Freedom Destinations)