We had booked a taxi to take us from Wickham Retreat to East Perth train station at 10am. This gave us just enough time to pop into the city and buy supplies for the train journey. We had already packed our bags the night before so after a quick shower, we moved our bags into the store room and jumped on a bus into the city. The one thing we hadn't factored into our plans was that it was of course Sunday and the shops don't open until around 10am on a Sunday!!! To avoid it being a completely wasted journey, we found a bakery which was open and bought some croissants and grabbed some sandwiches and sausage rolls from Pie Face! On the walk back to the hostel, we stopped the garage to pick up some sweets and biscuits, disaster averted!!!!
 
We could put it off no longer, it was time to say farewell to everyone at the Wickham Retreat and pack our bags into the taxi before making the short journey to the train station . Once there, we checked in our rucksacks and made our way to the platform to wait for boarding. Whilst we waited, we walked to the end of the platform to get some photos of the whole train as we couldn't believe how long it was! In total there were 29 carriages making it 687m long and weigh 1328 tonnes. There were 230 guests booked on the train leaving from Perth (some will join/leave between Perth & Sydney) with 27 crew to look after us all.
 
At about 11:30am we started to board the train but there was a mix up! Despite being told we would be sitting together when we booked the tickets, we had actually been allocated seats 22 & 25 which were nowhere near each other!!!!! Then to add to the confusion, a man came along and his ticket showed that he had been allocated seat 22 too!! After finding one of the stewards, the situation was quickly resolved as she explained that I had been moved to seat 26, right next to Matt!!! The next issue to overcome was the position of our seats! You see we had been sold this trip with the promise of spectacular scenery and amazing views, that's what made this a better option than flying, so imagine our dismay when we discovered our seats were between two windows and our view for the next 3 days would be spent looking at a wall!! Fortunately, the girls in front of us reclined their seats (and left them like that for most of the journey) so we had an excellent view through their window without even having to turn our heads!
 
After the safety procedures had been explained, we were off!!! Amazingly some people reclined their seats and fell asleep almost immediately but that wasn't the case for us! We sat and caught up with a bit of blog writing and I started a new book! The hours passed quicker than expected and it wasn't too long before we arrived at Kalgoorlie! We were stopping here for 3 hours so they could refuel and fill up the water tanks . This meant we were free to leave the train as long as we were back on board by 1am. Yes you did just read that right, we had 3 hours and up until 1 am so it was now 10pm!! It was good to get off the train, stretch our legs and get some fresh air but of course being 10pm everything was closed and apart from people from the train, the streets were deserted! We had a bit of a wander about the town, stopping at a couple of monuments and interesting sights before deciding it was pointless as there really wasn't anything to see and made our way back to the train. We decided to charge the iPad for a while in the dining car and whilst we were waiting we got chatting to the duty manager, he was a very chatty guy who was telling us lots of information about the train: that's where we learnt the length and weight of the train, we're not that geeky! He also told us about the gold and platinum carriages that have lovely beds, private showers like hotels and excellent food and drink laid on but all at a cost of about $2000 a night per person! This seems rather excessive but people obviously pay it as the train was almost full! We then made our way back to our seats, put our clocks forward an hour and settled down for a strange night's sleep!