William had us up nice and early this morning. It was pretty cold, but we had the sun behind the tent so at least we could sit in the sun to have our breakfast.
We packed up and headed to ‘Steam town’, the local train museum. We got in a guided tour of the big shed and the roundhouse outside. William was overwhelmed by the trains at the start and wanted to be carried everywhere. Plus, they also had sound effects in some of the carriages and this must have scared him. The guide was a former guard on the railway so he was very informative. We had a look through some old stream trains, diesel-electric trains and carriages from the early 1900’s. There was even an old carriage that used to travel the railway line with a Sister on it as a baby health nurse. It was surprising the good condition they were in, considering they hadn’t been restored. There were also carriages on display that had been the first to cross the Nullarbor. The tour went for 1 ½ hours.
We left Peterborough at about 10.30am and headed for Broken Hill. The car was running much better after the work was done on it yesterday. We were managing to drive constantly at about 100km/h. Once again, Kelley & William had a nap in the car. After they woke up we stopped at a rest area for sandwiches for lunch. We finally gave William his Easter egg once we were back in the car. He was very excited. Kelley drove through to Broken Hill and we arrived at about 2:30pm. We decided to go to the information centre first. A few things in town had already closed for the day, so we decided to just go up to a few lookouts before checking into the Caravan Park. The first lookout had a lovely view over the whole of Broken Hill and there was also a Miners Memorial to look at. It was a big wall with a list of all the fatalities occurred in the mine since it opened in the late 1800’s. There were a lot of deaths due to lead poisoning, rock falls and falling into shafts. The youngest victim was a 12 year old boy. Luckily in the past 20 years there have only been a couple of deaths. The second lookout was the best. It was at the site of an old mine shaft that had long been closed. It looked out to the North Mine which has also been closed since 1993. There were 3 shafts that went down, you can still see two of them, but the other has since been turned into an open cut mine as the minerals were close to the surface there. One of the shafts was the deepest in Australia at 1.6kms.
We then headed to our Caravan Park for the night; it was the same one we had stayed in last time we were here. It was cold once again here tonight and we had the heater on early and even ate dinner in the tent. Once we had cleaned up we also sat in the tent where it was warm.
We have a big day driving tomorrow. We will hopefully make it to Bourke, which is 620 kms away. After that we are heading to Gunnedah for a few days to spend some time with Pop Pick. We are aiming to be home late Saturday.