Luxury route
Indian Pacific
Sydney → Perth · Australia
Indian Pacific in pictures



Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 4,352 km
- Fastest time
- ≈ 65 h
- Average speed
- 67 km/h
- Top speed
- 115 km/h
- Operator
- Journey Beyond
- Train
- Expedition sleeper
- Countries
- Australia
- In service since
- 1970
- Runs
- 1× weekly each way, year-round
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Ocean to ocean across Australia, including the world’s longest railway straight: 478 dead-level kilometres on the Nullarbor.
The journey exists because 1970 finally brought a single standard-gauge track from coast to coast, and the inaugural train was mobbed at every siding. Today it climbs the Blue Mountains out of Sydney, pauses in Broken Hill’s mining moonscape and in Adelaide, then settles into the Nullarbor, where travellers step down at Cook, population about four, to stand in the ringing desert silence. Gold-rush Kalgoorlie arrives after dark before the Avon Valley delivers you to Perth.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 2033217 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within 109 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 30 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Journey Beyond — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Blue Mountains sandstone country
- Broken Hill’s outback skyline
- Adelaide stopover
- Cook ghost town on the Nullarbor
- gold-rush Kalgoorlie
- Avon Valley into Perth
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