The Road to William Creek

It’s a relatively short drive from Muloorina to William Creek, 250 kilometres, and truth be known most people do it in one day. But why hurry? We spent the first night at Curdimurka siding a ruin at the site of an Old Ghan railway siding. Its glory days may be gone, but it still has its uses. Providing a lovely backdrop to campers such as us and offering shelter from the extremes for quite a few birds.    

You may well be asking, “What’s a siding?” I know I was, until we started to follow the Old Ghan rail track (a twelve-hundred kilometre stretch of narrow gauge railway which runs from Port Augusta to Alice Springs). Simply put, a siding is a section of track, off to one side of the main track, which is used for one train to wait o, while another passes by. Because the Old Ghan is a single-track line this was necessary to allow for two-way traffic. There will be at least one building near each siding, a square water tank to service the old steam engines. There are also usually fettlers cottages for the rail workers.  

Now all that is left of the Old Ghan are a few sections of line, quite a lot of the old bridges and some of the buildings near the sidings.

The following day we camped at Beresford siding. This must be one of the best maintained buildings that we have seen, and as an added bonus, it had a nice big dam within easy walking distance.

I know it seems as though we take a ridiculous amount of time to travel from one destination to the next and I’m sure you must think we travel at, like 50 kilometres an hour, but that’s not the case. We take a lot of time to explore sites along the road, like Coward Springs, but the main reasons are:

1. We have no need to hurry
2. I keep saying, “Oh, can you stop the car? I want a photo of that.”
3. Peter keeps saying, “Look! There’s a hill I want to climb it.”
4. Hugo keeps saying, “I need to pee.”

So, we take our time, take lots of photos, climb lots of hills, take more photos and have frequent pee stops.

Next stop William Creek and Lake Eyre…I promise!