Need a mini-holiday? Hop a local train for a few hours

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This was published 1 year ago

Need a mini-holiday? Hop a local train for a few hours

By Lee Tulloch
A ride on a local or even suburban train can feel like a mini holiday.

A ride on a local or even suburban train can feel like a mini holiday.Credit: iStock

Australians really took up the challenge of travelling in their own backyard these past two years.

According to Tourism Australia, spending on overnight and day trips in the past year exceeded levels before the pandemic. This year, it's expected that international trips will be down, but shorter day trips and intrastate trips are expected to rise as cost-of-living pressures start to bite.

All travel doesn't have to be a huge adventure. In fact, some of the most delightful short trips you can take are on your doorstep, quite literally in some cases.

The Hawkesbury River. 

The Hawkesbury River. Credit: iStock

There's a kind of travel so micro, it involves travelling through other people's backyards.

That is, on suburban and local trains.

I've not alone in lamenting the lack of a great interstate train network in this country, but that's not to say as a nation we're bad at trains. In fact, we have some glorious train trips that commuters experience every day, and they're the best value way to have a tiny holiday, even if it only lasts a few hours.

Most people are fixated on big holidays, but micro breaks – a few hours out of our routines, doing something entirely novel - are great for our mental health. It's possible to make lifelong memories from something that takes as little planning as swiping your card at the local station.

I was thinking about this recently, when one weekday I took the train to Woy Woy from Sydney's Central station with a group of friends. We were heading for lunch at the Lucky Bee at Ettalong Beach, a restaurant I'd wanted to visit but was waiting for the "right'' moment when I could get a ride there, thinking travelling by car was the easiest way.

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The friends suggested we take the train. Woy Woy is on the express line to Newcastle, a popular commuter route, especially for the many increasing numbers of people choosing to live on NSW's Central Coast.

The scenery was exquisite as we curved through the flowering bushland and around the banks of the Hawkesbury River. You can't see all the inlets and coves from the roads and enjoying it from an air-conditioned carriage made the whole experience so much more relaxing than driving. We got a taxi quickly from the station, had a wonderful yum cha by the water, and caught the train home before dark.

It was as lovely as the Amalfi Coast in its own way and without the hassle. And while I think international travel is always worth the hassle, it's not always relaxing. I felt as if I'd had a real break, even though I had only travelled 90 kilometres from home.

For several years I lived near Thirroul, a coastal suburb between Sydney and Wollongong. The train service between the two cities, which went as far south as Kiama, ran two or three times an hour. The 75-minute trip to Thirroul must be one of the most beautiful commuter journeys in the world, cutting through the Royal National Park, the picturesquely abandoned coal mine at Coalcliff, and then hugging the magnificent surf coast all the way south, with the Illawarra escarpment looming on one side.

This was my commute into the city, and I felt grateful for it every time. Because so much of Australia is coastline, including most of our cities, these breathtaking journeys are replicated throughout the country. But the inland journeys have their own beauty too. I grew up in a suburb of Melbourne that only had buses and trams but I remember frequent trips on the Ballarat Line, a commuter ride for some, where you can visit Victoria's central highlands in just under 90 minutes.

But even those suburban train trips that rattle through less picturesque and mundane suburbia have a huge appeal for a natural stickybeak like me. I love other people's backyards.

You never really know a place until you see how people live their real lives and backyards, normally sheltered from prying eyes, are so revealing of the everyday.

I love Hills Hoists and crumbling old outhouses, chook pens and vegetable patches, rusting car bodies and children's swings. Every now and again you see a Balinese hut, a fire-pit, a palatial doghouse, a row of beehives or a farmyard animal. It's endlessly fascinating.

If the big holiday seems too many months away, think about taking a tiny, very sustainable break on a local train to somewhere completely different. And if you do it every day – go in another direction.

Lee.tulloch@traveller.com

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