Yass Junction was a lovely little station, well maintained and with a rose bed.
There were lots of sparrows chirping and you could have been in England until a king parrot started to twitter like a budgie. The bus from Canberra arrived and we were joined by another ten passengers. The five coach train arrived on time and looked a lot like a UK Intercity 125 with power trains at each end.
As with the train from Sydney to Canberra it was fully booked. The journey time to Melbourne (640 km) was expected to be 7:30 hours so an average speed of 85 km/hr. The train arrived 10 minutes late. For comparison Beziers to Paris is about 830 km and takes about 4:30 hrs on a TGV.
It was only when we arrived in Melbourne that we realised that the train gauge on the Sydney line is different to the local gauge and so we pulled into a special, separate platform.
Travelling by train is much more pleasant than travelling by a car. We saw more of the countryside, ate another good, cheap lunch and drank cups of tea. The under resourcing of the railway was amusing; some platforms are very short so you could only exit from one door of the train. The train even had to stop twice at some stations: once to let off passengers and once to disembark the luggage.
More incongruous facts became apparent when we reached Melbourne. Our train could only alight at two platforms as the gauge for Sydney trains is different from those in Melbourne! We saw the grand Victorian building housing the administration of the Victorian Railways - it was twice the size of the town hall!
We do hope that Australia wakens up to the benefits of high speed rail links between its major cities, but we are not holding our breath.
Pat and John on tour