My partner really likes trains and so, on the weekend of the 11th of April, we went for a short 1 hour drive to Goulburn to check out the Rail Heritage Centre’s 40th Anniversary open weekend. We left home around 9am and arrived at the museum just after 10am - its was quite cold and blustery and I was grateful to have brought a jacket.
They had a steam train running in the yard that we were allowed to go up and stand in the cab of - this was lovely since it was warm in there. They allowed me to pull the cord for the horn, so that was a novelty. We spent some time looking around the trains and the museum. There was a good range of exhibits and historical artifacts and I particularly found some of the old maps quite interesting. It reminded me a lot of the Roundhouse Museum at Junee that we visited in 2024 (it seems like we end up visiting at least one railway museum a year).
Once we finished up at the museum, we went for a drive to the local shopping centre so that my partner could buy herself a jacket because she forgot to bring one. We grabbed lunch and a coffee while we were there. After that, we headed over to the Goulburn Waterworks Museum to check it out. Unfortunately, I didn’t take many pictures and it was the following weekend (18th April) that they had their steam engine run day! We happened to walk down while a guide was giving a tour and it turned out to be significantly more interesting than I expected.
The waterworks was built in the late 1800s and is centred around a large steam engine that drives a huge wheel to pumped water to the town. The scale of this was insane and I plan to go back and see it in action at some point. The engine is an 1883 Appleby Beam and is one of the last working examples in the world, this one having somehow survived being melted down for scrap during the war through a stroke of sheer luck. Much of the building and the machines are extremely well preserved and it was fantastic seeing these things so well-loved.
Once we wrapped up at the waterworks, we went and checked into our hotel - the Mercure Goulburn. After unpacking the car, I read a book for a little bit and then took a nap because the day had taken it out of me. The room was nice, though I was a bit disappointed that the toilet paper was a locked single-sheet dispenser. Dunno about you, but I hate wiping with singular thin sheets of paper. It was kind of disappointing given it’s supposed to be a 4- or 5-star hotel. Anyway, once I woke from my nap, we went to dinner at the restaurant attached to the hotel. I wasn’t expecting much and we almost didn’t get a table for lack of booking, but they squeezed us in.
I had a chicken cordon bleu for dinner and my partner had a pasta dish. The food was absolutely delicious and we ordered desserts (lemon meringue tart for her, affogato for me).
After dinner, we went back out to the rail museum for our night time photography session. I enjoyed this a lot more than the daytime session. We watched the Picnic train roll in from its trip out for the day and they rotated it on the turntable for us to admire.
I got some pretty spectacular photos of the steam trains doing their thing with the eerie workshop lighting around them. These photos are from my phone because I haven’t bothered to process the shots from my DSLR.
The next morning we had breakfast at the Trapper’s Bakery (disappointing) and headed home. The cat was glad to see us and I was glad to be home to finish up the mini I’d started painting before we left. ;)