May 7, 2018
Day one Melbourne to Albury
We had a short ride from home to our local suburban railway station, Mitcham for a short half hour trip to Southern Cross Station for our country train to Albury, the start of our ride. Unfortunately some low life had stolen a lot of copper from the signalling circuit and the incoming train was about an hour late and the locomotive had to be refueled which took twenty minutes so our departure was about fifty minutes late.
On all the other country lines we have had to unload the panniers and loosen the S&S couplers to fit the bike into the luggage compartment but on this line there is a power van in the consist and half the space is partitioned off into a large luggage area and we were able to wheel the bike with panniers in place into the van.
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The train arrived in Albury about 5PM and we set off on a five km ride to our destination the YHA hostel. Mary and Mike met through a Youth Hostels affinity group and tomorrow will be our 47th wedding anniversary.
The Albury Railway Station is an impressive building from the days when train travel was in its infancy in OZ and the states had different rail gauges, New South Wales taking the British four foot eight and a half inches (something to do with the width of the wheels on Roman chariots which left ruts in the Roman roads) while Victoria took the slightly wider Irish gauge.
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Anyway passengers from Melbourne to Sydney had to change trains in Albury due to the break of gauge so the Albury Station has two very long platforms so the passengers simply crossed from one side of the platform to the other. Inter state rivalry was strong and still is so NSW had to have an imposing station building.
Meanwhile Victoria has seen the light on the north east line at least which is now also standard gauge so NSW Rail now runs through trains between Sydney and Melbourne.
Photos-we each have a Nikon A300 point and shoot camera and the journal is written on our Samsung tablet. We have a Nikon Snapbridge app to transfer the pics to the Tablet but atm the app only recognises one of the cameras and secondly the uploaded pics in the tablet directory are very small thumb nails and very hard for us to identify so we fear that the photo uploads will have to wait until we are back at home in front of our desktop.
We get quite a lot of you don't see many tandems these days followed by accounts of tandems in the past but this time the maintenance man at the place we were staying at told us that his uncle Ian Brown was on the Australian team that won the tandem sprint at the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956. We were able to tell him that when we had our tandem on a suburban train in Melbourne a few years back a fellow passenger told us that her husband Tony Marchant had won the Gold medal in the tandem sprint in the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. So now we have the full set!
Today's ride: 10 km (6 miles)
Total: 10 km (6 miles)
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6 years ago