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經濟類文章精選：Clattering over a moonscape
16 Clattering over a moonscape
The great railway revival
THE train was running late, but the 35 aboriginal children who had travelled for two hours through the South Australian desert to meet it did not seem to mind. It was, after all, Australia’s and one of the world’s most unusual train journeys. When the Indian Pacific passenger train finally ground to a halt at Watson, a siding on Australia’s transcontinental line, the children burst into a rendition of a Spanish Christmas song, "Feliz Navidad", as Father Christmas disembarked to distribute gifts.
Watson is a red desert moonscape on the Nullarbor Plain at the eastern end of the world’s longest stretch of straight rail track, 478km (297 miles). This is a mere one-tenth of the 4,352km, three-day journey the train was making between Sydney on Australia’s east coast and Perth on the west coast. The Indian Pacific and its predecessors, such as the Tea and Sugar Train that took provisions to isolated outback communities, were once symbols of Australia’s conquest of its vast distances. But by the 1990s, air travel and the neglect of Australia’s railways by their federal and state-government owners almost killed the last east-west passenger train.
After threatening to close the loss-making Indian Pacific, the federal government in Canberra sold it and the Ghan, another outback passenger train, to Great Southern Railway (GSR), a British-owned private consortium, in 1997. GSR has now turned a first-year loss of A$20m ($15m) into a small operating profit by restoring rolling stock, hiring young, multi-skilled, non-unionised crews and re-marketing the trains to locals and tourists alike. One innovation was to send the Indian Pacific on a whistle-stop Christmas run taking gifts and music to the outback. This year’s journey, the fifth, with impromptu concerts at remote sidings by Jimmy Barnes, an Austral
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