Wanderung 20

Australian Walkabout

May - June 2009

Thursday, June 18th, Drive from Gayndah to Ipswich.

Bob:

As we continued South the country became much more definitively ranchland. Although hot and dry, there was apparently just enough water to provide adequate forage for cattle. Surprisingly we saw few, if any, sheep.

Another surprise was how few and far between the gas stations were, and that made waiting until we found cheap gasoline very risky indeed. In fact, we were finally forced to stop at a town where we found a Toyota dealer but searched in vain for a gas station. Failing to find one on the main road or in the downtown area but knowing that you couldn't have a car dealership out in the middle of nowhere without some local gas station, we systematically took every road into or out of town until we did locate the town's only gas station. Predictably, given the monopolistic situation, the gasoline was quite expensive so we just put in 10 dollars worth in order to safely make it to the next major city.

We had lunch in an old cafe in the central business district of one of the towns in the cattle district, and while we waited for our order we read the local newspaper. The news was mostly about cattle, but one article about sheep depicted in gory detail the problem with an invading species of a non-native spike-headed grass that penetrates the sheep's hide and causes festering wounds. Not really a pre-lunch article, but interesting nonetheless as the paper provided pictures so that other herders could distinguish the dangerous invading grass from normal pasture grasses.

Another fascinating part of the paper was what I would call the Personal Ads. Unlike the brief, cryptic, and uninformative adds in most big-city U.S. papers, each add was a full column headed by a color picture of the guy or girl. The column ran for six or more inches and contained a wealth of information for the prospective dater. It struck me that with such a sparse population density in the cattle country it really would be hard to meet enough young folks to find a good soul mate and those personal ads were a reasonable approach to the problem. I was amused, though, that all the girls except one gave their astrological birth sign as part of their information whereas none of the young cowhands did!

Monika:

Today seemed to be destined to be a pure driving day. The landscape was interesting but not that varied with a few old fashioned windmills here and there. The surprise was that gas stations and food outlets were not along the road but more inside little towns. In other words, we did not drive through a lot of towns but passed them.

To find a gas station, we did drive through the complete town, before we finally chanced upon one. But lunch we found in a little diner right in the middle of another little town. I was ordering a hamburger, when I got the question of "standard" vs "deluxe". Asking what was on each, I found out that the "standard" only had lettuce, tomato, pickle, and, of course, a slice of beet, whereas the "deluxe" would have added pineapple along with other goodies. Well, the standard was good enough for me, and indeed it was a big burger, that thoroughly satisfied me.

After lunch we continued driving past a large reservoir that apparently holds water for Brisbane.


 

Bob:

We arrived in Ipswich around noon and decided to see the Train Museum while we were in the area. The train museum turned out to be a converted railroad repair facility dating from the days of the steam locomotives. Although most of the main building had been converted to displays, some of the areas in back were still in use for the repair and maintenance of the steam locomotives that still haul excursion trains on short scenic routes in Queensland.

I was very surprised to learn that Queensland had adopted a narrow-gauge railroad as its standard back in the 1800s. Apparently it was far cheaper per mile to build and the politicians who were funding constructing adopted narrow-gauge as a cost-saving measure. Of course, since New South Wales (and the rest of Australia, I think), had adopted a standard-guage width for their railroad track, trains had to stop at the border of New South Wales and transfer all passengers and freight. That solved the mystery of those little narrow-gauge tracks I had seen during our drive South, which I mistakenly assumed were just local freight lines for hauling cattle, sugar cane, or whatever.

The narrowness of the tracks also helped explain why Queensland developed the "tilt train" for its express inter-city travel. Rounding those tight narrow-gauge curves at high speed on top of a narrow track width could have unfortunate consequences! The museum had a nice mock-up of the cab of the tilt train with a video screen so that you could see how it would look from the driver's seat.

Monika:

I had picked up a little brochure on the towns of southern Queensland and we read that the town of Ipswich, besides being only an hour or two from Brisbane, had a railroad museum and some cheap motels.

The railroad museum was a definite draw, and we decided to go there first, before it closed. It was in an old maintenance yard with some of the maintenance facilities still open for viewing.

We first looked into the main building and I was especialy enthralled by a circus train that was on exhibit.

Inside the museum were a lot more old cars with a lot of hands on displays. Bob (ok, I did too) especially enjoyed driving a diesel engine and trying to stop it on time when he reached the station.


 


 

Bob:

The museum had a display where visitors could drive a full-size real train simulator, and both Monika and I had lots of fun trying that out. I even got stopped successfully at the station and started up again to run down the track some more. It was fascinating to use the large, somewhat awkwardly placed controls of the train engineer to start and stop the train. Unlike a car or small airplane, there is a huge amount of mass to accelerate or decelerate with a train, so you must anticipate required control movements by many seconds or else you overshoot or undershoot. I suspect those time lags are more similar to the control action of an airship, so getting used to those lags was good practice for me.

We also took a tour of the shop section in the back area before we left. Our guide was very knowledgeable and we watched welding, stamping, milling and cutting operations being used to make tools for use on the railways. I was of course in hog heaven watching really big tools do really loud clanging, hissing, and sparking things. My hands literally itched to give some of those tools a try (you don't find tools that size just anywhere!), but I had to settle for observing apprentices doing the work. I was very surprised that the arc welding maching they used was only 6 volts DC although it had several thousand amperes capacity as I recall. I had learned both AC and DC arc welding back in my Army days but I am pretty sure the welders we used had much higher voltages.

Monika:

We also took a tour of one of the shop areas in back, where they still do work on the old machinery and even have apprentices to hand down the knowledge.


 

Bob:

After the museum we decided to stay overnight in Ipswich and drive downtown to Brisbane the next day to turn in the car. That gave us time to walk over to the new shopping center just down the street from our motel and look around. Serendipitously we found very inexpensive dinners at a shop that was closing up for the evening, a personal-sized pizza for Monika and a large calzone for me cost only $2 each. That gave us a nice evening meal and we turned in early as I figured we had to start out fairly early in the morning to get the rental car back into downtown Brisbane by 10:00 a.m.

Monika:

We stopped at one of the hotels on the outskirts and walked over to a shopping mall to look around and get some food for dinner. But then it was bed time, since the next morning we had to brave the Brisbane traffic and hand the car beck in by 10 o'clock.

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Australian Walkabout Epilog

May 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
June 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30

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