We now leave our first WWOOFing host. We really had a great time at Rhondda’s farm. We are now heading to Melbourne. Rhondda drops us off at Moss Vale station, from where we are taking a night train. Our train leaves at 10:18 pm and arrives in Melbourne at 7:30 am. 9 hours in the train, by night, we’ll see how it goes with NSW Trainlink!

Tickets

This time, we have booked our tickets online. Very convenient! We don’t need to print them because we can show them on our smartphone. Here, no need to validate your ticket, everybody is controlled!

Thanks to the discovery passes we’ve got, we can travel as much as we want on the NSW Trainlink network, on economy seats. For the night train, we could have upgraded our tickets for sleeping berths, but we would have to pay the difference (for this trip: around $250). So, it’s going to be economy seats for us!

The trip

The train is still on time and very quiet this time. Great for a night train! Inside, it’s once again quite spacious. Seats can lean back a bit. We’ll see if we can sleep.

For the first hours, it is quite difficult. Sometimes we are falling asleep but 15 minutes later, we are awake again, struggling to find the good position. We won’t blame it on the train…. Sleeping while seated has never been easy!

The miracle

At around 3 am, a miracle occurs! The train stops at a station and the couple who was seating next to us got off the train. We wait 5 minutes to see if someone else is going to seat here but it seems not! We can now use two seats each which is quite better to sleep and indeed it works! When we arrive in Melbourne (10 minutes ahead of schedule), we are not so tired. We have managed to get some rest during the night. We won’t even need to take a nap during the day!

We have been quite satisfied with this night train. We would certainly have had a better sleep on sleeping berths but that’s all right! We’ll probably take the train by night again because it seems that we can save a lot of time, compared with driving, for long and direct trips!

It is now time to enjoy Melbourne, where we will stay during the next 2 weeks!