Qualla: Loongana railway station https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:26 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Loongana railway station https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station Loongana railway station: Introduction https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station/ Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand on the platform at Loongana and look east, and the rails do something they do almost nowhere else on the planet: they refuse to turn. From here the Trans-Australian Railway runs dead straight for 478 kilometres, all the way to a point past Ooldea in South Australia, without so much as a gentle curve. There is nothing to curve around. The Nullarbor is the largest single slab of limestone in the world, flat to the horizon in every direction, and the engineers who laid this line in the 1910s simply pointed it east and kept going.

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/qf6r-loongana-railway-station-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Loongana railway station: The Longest Straight https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station/ Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. Loongana sits at the western threshold of a record that has no real rival. The straight section, beginning near here between Nurina and Loongana, measures 478 kilometres, the longest perfectly straight stretch of railway anywhere on Earth. It is not, however, level. The land bene...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/qf6r-loongana-railway-station-the-longest-straight.mp3 0:06 2 full Loongana railway station: A Town That Came by Train https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station/ Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. Loongana was never a town in any ordinary sense. It began as a lime mine with a processing plant, a cluster of railway cottages, and the people needed to keep the track in repair. Out here, nothing arrived by road. Everything came by rail, including the water, the mail, and the g...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/qf6r-loongana-railway-station-a-town-that-came-by-train.mp3 0:06 3 full Loongana railway station: The Train That No Longer Stops https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station/ Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Indian Pacific still passes through, the only passenger service that runs the entire Trans-Australian line between Perth and Sydney. But it does not stop at Loongana anymore. It slides past at speed, a long silver thread crossing a plain so empty that the train can feel like ...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/qf6r-loongana-railway-station-the-train-that-no-longer-stops.mp3 0:06 4 full Loongana railway station: Living on the Nullarbor https://qualla.com/loongana-railway-station/ Photo credit W. Bulach, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name Nullarbor comes from Latin, nullus arbor, no trees, and the plain earns it. There is no shade here, no river, no relief from a sky that fills the entire view. Summer heat hammers the limestone; winter nights turn sharply cold. What the surface hides is just as strange as...

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Image: W. Bulach | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/f/6/r/loongana-railway-station-wp/qf6r-loongana-railway-station-living-on-the-nullarbor.mp3 0:06 5 full