Wanderlust 2 – vintage railways and a windmill

*Also sending this to Fiesta Friday 22 at Angie’s, this time with a messenger monkey! I think he likes anything and everything food and drink, and sometimes cameras*

A few years ago, I discovered a book called “100 great books in haiku” by David Bader. Witty, sometimes plain funny, it was a great way to while away an afternoon.

For Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, party of the haiku was:

“roadde trippe!” (the rest, appropriately for Chaucer, was a tad demi-scatological…)

Ever since then, before every road trip, I always said to myself, “roadde trippe!” (childish, isn’t it?)

I said the same thing before heading off to Myanmar. And before our regional NSW road trip during the Easter/Anzac Day break. So in the spirit of road tripping and wanderlusting, here are some more photos from that trip (the first lot of photos are here).

This trip unexpectedly became a journey around historic railway monuments in our regional centres. Some were sad relics. Like these wooden truss bridges in Gundagai. What a project! The bridges spanned the Murrumbidgee River flood plains (by the way, isn’t Murrumbidgee a great-sounding word that just wants to roll around your tongue?). The first was the Prince Alfred at 922 meters, which formed part of the Old Hume Highway. The second was part of the Gundagai to Tumut railway at 819 meters.

But the engineering ambition was greater than the size of the public purse, or something. These bridges fell into disrepair later in the century.

Despite some equally ambitious, perhaps utopian, restoration plans, they remain crumbling and fenced off with no public access. The sign described the pair of bridges as a ‘managed ruin’. Poetic, more than a little sad, especially in the twilight hours.

There were other, less ruined, signs of the great Victorian age of railways. Gundagai had a railway connection that was maybe part of the Sydney-Melbourn line? In any case, it still boasts the longest wooden train station in the state. I guess people stopped building wooden train stations soon after the Gundagai one was complete? The again is now maintained by the local historic society, and it was a modest beauty looking onto neighbouring paddocks and hills.

On the grand scale, at the heart of the interstate train universe, was Albury. Sitting on the state border, in an age when one state had narrow gauge railways and one had a different kind (um, broad gauge??), Albury was where passengers had to change trains.

And on a non-railway note, we also came across a windmill, built by a German no less! (This was near Cooma, not Albury)

Stay tuned for the third and last part of this road trip (if I can find another 5 star hotel with free wifi this afternoon), when we get to the Snowy Mountains and surrounds. And climb the tallest mountain in Australia!

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Tagged: Albury, Easter, Gundagai, NSW, railway, road trip, train station, travel, travel photography, vintage, wanderlust, windmill