26/09/21 All About Trains: Melrose to Peterborough

-

I know you were all breathlessly waiting for the cheese tree finale and I didn't get to post on the day because I was out and about doing train stuff, so sorry about that, and I will put you out of your misery now.

The Tail of the Cheese Tree 

In 1860 George Bishop moved to the Melrose area with his wife Eda.  I don't know where George worked but my money is on a dairy, because he was given quantities of milk as part of his work.  Now Eda was an industrious woman and she started turning this milk into cheese.  Although she was industrious she wasn't necessarily a fan of working any harder than she had to, so she developed the cheese tree method of pressing cheese.  She placed the end of long rails into the mortice holes and hung weights on the other end, using this contraption to press the cheese until it was mature enough for sale. As far as anyone knows she was the only person to ever enlist a tree in this way to help press cheese, and history is silent on her level of success as a fromager.  I'm told that her descendants still live in the Melrose area, however they do not have any further association with cheese and are not creative in their use of trees. 

So there you have it, the story of the cheese tree in Melrose, South Australia.  I hope it was worth the wait.

We said goodbye to Melrose and Mount Remarkable, and got as far as Boolero where we tried to do some grocery shopping but the IGA was closed due to it being Sunday. We spoke to a local who was very disgruntled about the closure as he felt that all the caravans rolling past would otherwise be stopping to shop. We made like the caravans and rolled on to Orroroo where we had 1030 Cup of Tea (COT) in the Lions Park, and a very nice little oasis it was too. 

Last views of Mt Remarkable, rising above the canola crops.

Someone was having a Very Bad Day.  Our best guess was that this was due to the very strong cross wind.

 
The Lions Park had many things to recommend it: shade, a waterhole, the cleanest tank toilets I'd ever seen, walking trails, proximity to the golf course.  It even had a children's playground featuring this rather creepy multi-legged nightmare-inducing insectoid/snakey thing for children to play on.

By lunchtime we were in Peterborough where we were fully prepared to spend quite some time looking at trains, and spent even more time than we expected on a tour through the Steam Town Heritage Museum.

Peterborough has an impressive set of railway credentials from the age of steam, including being at one stage part of the busiest rail line in the world, and also being at the time one of only three triple-gauge railway junctions in Australia and now having the only turntable left where all three gauges are still in place.

I took a lot of photos of trains and train-related things.


Old carriages out in the yard.

Steam train profile.

Train shed and carriages.

Roger in the dining car from another era.

"The Commonwealth has added a new terror to the trials of modern travel by installing pianos in the lounge cars of the Great Western Railway. In a hotel one can escape, on a steamer there is always refuge, but for the victim of a musical enthusiast in a railway train there can be no hope.  The pianos are being installed for three months to ascertain how they stand it.  It is just the thin edge of the trombone, and is the fore runner of the jazz band with a lady conductor."

Imagine the horror!  The slippery slope of musical debauchery would end up with a jazz band with a lady conductor!  All hope was lost for the railways at this point.

The turntable and work sheds.

How to travel in style on the railroads. 

Examples of the three gauges.

We had a little break to do our usual gawk walk downtown, which was a little bit sad because Peterborough has obviously been hit hard by C19 and lots of businesses were permanently closed.  Peterborough has a lot of beautiful old buildings, closed or no.

Some not in the best condition,

...one of those being the railway station.  Lots of freight trains pass through, the Indian Pacific currently doesn't run due to Covid restrictions, and the Peterborough Railway Station primarily caters to pigeons.

A royal nod.

Grand old buildings.

We tried to do our bit for the economy and at 7pm we were back at Steamtown for the night show.

Night Loco.

Home for the night: Peterborough Caravan Park with green grass and a nice view out over the plains where we could see the freight trains coming into town.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

23/12/21 The Dinosaurs of Newtown

-
Image
Some time in the months before Christmas, somewhere near Newtown, a shop had a sale of inflatable Christmas dinosaurs. Lots of people thought that a large inflatable dinosaur was just what they needed for their 2021 outdoor festive decor, so they bought the dinosaurs and then discovered that, once inflated, they were very big. Not as big as a real dinosaur would have been, obviously, but certainly big enough to be inconvenient if you happen to live in a trendy little terrace house with a handkerchief of front lawn and second story verandah almost the size of half a vegemite sandwich.   Dinosaur #1: taking up all the available verandah space I imagine that at this stage the dinosaur purchasers may have considered the size of the dinosaur (inflated or otherwise) in relation to their rubbish bin, but were likely prevented from this course of action by children who, enamoured of dinosaurs, had welcomed the creature into the Christmas fold and called it something festive like Rudolph, o...
Read more

Minor Adventures on Quiet Days

-
Image
 Roger took himself off on the train to South Australia for a week, so BD and I decided to have some adventures of our own, albeit not as exciting as riding the interstate train to Adelaide and getting to have an up-close stickybeak at the flooded Murray River. We took ourselves off to the Ormond Lookout to watch the sun set instead. As did rather more people than what we had anticipated. Mobs, in fact. We found a patch of dirt grass and settled in.  "I'm gonna come back here!" declared BD.  She wriggled around a bit: our patch of grass was on quite a slope and she kept sliding out of her shorts.  "With a chair," she added. In between admiring other people's dogs and taking observational lessons in 101 Ways To Take A Selfie, we watched the sun trundle slowly toward the horizon. No sunset is complete without a picnic. There she goes. Further down the beach, a container ship puttered across the horizon under the gaze of a lone beach-sitter.  And us, of course...
Read more

Quiet Life with Cat

-
Image
 After all the excitement of hospital stays, Emergency Department visits, and trying to balance the cost-benefit ratio of hospital cafeteria food, life became a little more settled.  After a week of blessedly boring drug levels BD was given a reprieve from daily blood tests and we, therefore, were released from daily drives to the nearest Melbourne Pathology lab.  We did some laundry and did some cleaning and I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride or two.  Not that the weather was very conducive to enjoyable and relaxing bike riding, but I went anyway. All was fine at Albert Park, where the swans put on a good show, playing happy families all across the playing fields.  But that didn't last for long. Back at home the new cat let his crazy out to play.  He zoomed up and down the hallway in the middle of the night; scared the bejeebers out of us by jumping on the sound bar and blasting us with high volume TV; hid under chairs and batted at our ankles as w...
Read more