Australia For Everyone

The Spirit of Progress was the premier express passenger train on the Victorian Railways in Australia, running from Melbourne to the New South Wales border at Albury, and later through to Sydney. The service ushered in a standard of passenger train speed and comfort not previously seen in Australia.

When Nigel Love brought an ex-war flying machine to Australia in 1918, he sought a suitable place to land and garage it. A friend recommended he look in the Botany area as it was close to Sydney yet far enough away so as to be fairly isolated from nosy sightseers. He ended up leasing 400 acres of open paddocks between the Botany Railway line and the Cooks River.

Today, when you cross the vast deserts of Central Australia aboard The Ghan train, you do so seated in a soft armchair in air-conditioned comfort. But in the early days of The Ghan, it was quite a different story. This narrow-gauge line it first travelled on lay well over 100km east of the current one, and was no pleasure trip.

During a visit to Australia by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Lord Kitchener in 1911, he stressed the importance of a Trans Australia line in the defence of the nation to the Federal Parliament and urged them to commence its construction without delay. Following the introduction of a bill into Federal Parliament by the Minister for Home Affairs, King O'Malley, a vote for the new Transcontinental Railway was passed on 6th December 1911.

3801 (pronounced Thirty-eight o-one) is Australia's best known and most widely travelled steam locomotive operated by the New South Wales Government Railway. The streamlined locomotive was designed to haul express trains such as the Newcastle Flyer and Melbourne Limited for the New South Wales Government Railways (NSWGR).