Looking back to the golden age of rail in WA

Kevin Pearce looks back fondly on the 1980s as the golden age of train travel in Western Australia

Interested in trains since childhood, Kevin, who turns 81 in December 2024, started organising charity rail tours 60 years ago before going on to establish Kevin Pearce Tours as a business 40 years ago.

“The heyday of Sunday excursion trains was the 1980s,” Kevin said.

“I was carrying something like 10,000 passengers a year, as was Hotham Valley and the Railway Historical Society.

“That all finished in the late 80s because of the lack of rolling stock, the carriages were all disbanded and that sort of thing.”

While the days of charter rail tours to Esperance, Albany and Geraldton are long gone, Kevin keeps the spirit of intrastate rail travel alive through his Wheatlands Escape Rail Tour and Goldfields-Esperance Rail and Coach Tour. He plans to resume tours to the South West when the new Australind is back on the tracks next year.

Kevin, with business partner and husband Rory Oktaviano, also runs an annual Christmas Rail Tour using the MerredinLink train to Cunderdin and Northam. The tour offers three nights at the historic Rec Hotel in Northam and includes side tours to York and Beverley.

The Northam trip has a hint of nostalgia to it — that’s the first place Kevin travelled as a five-year old, to visit relatives with his mother.

Most of Kevin’s customers are retirees in their 60s and 70s and from Perth but his oldest passenger was 99. Many are repeat customers. A few even attended his wedding in 2020.

“Because we have mature age people, every tour I do now we have an entertainment night and they just love it,” Kevin said.

“Even with the Great Java Rail Tour (Kevin’s only annual international tour), the welcoming night we have a six-piece band and guests love that.

“With the Wheatlands tour we use opera singer Jay Weston and you can hear a pin drop when he performs.”

Kevin says it is rewarding to see people enjoying themselves and it is all part of his tour style to include entertainment, porterage and meals so the passengers don’t have to organise any of it.

“Everything we do locally fills, there is a demand for rail travel which is very limited in this State,” he said.

“If you look at our three-day Wheatlands tour, we have people coming from Busselton and Bunbury, making their way up to Perth just for this train experience to Cunderdin and Northam, now that says something doesn’t it!”

In his dream future, Kevin would like to see passenger train services reintroduced to Albany and Geraldton.

“There is the potential for tourism, the lines are already operating lines and all they need is a train.”

Having travelled the world extensively by rail, the bucket list trip for Kevin would be the Orient Express.

“The high-speed bullet trains, I don’t have the same interest in those, I am more of a nostalgic train traveller, seeing the countryside, enjoying a beer while you’re travelling along that’s what I like.

“They’re doing away with dining cars and that is part of the romance of train travel.”

The highlight of Kevin’s train life was operating the first passenger train on the Perth to Fremantle line in February 1983, which had been controversially closed to passenger trains by the Liberal government in September 1979.

“On a Sunday in February I had organised one of my regular Serpentine BBQ trips with the train travelling via Armadale,” he reflects.

“The week before there was the State election with Labor promising to reopen the line — and Labor won.

“I immediately rang Westrail on the Monday morning and asked if my Serpentine charter train could run via the Fremantle line. The answer was an immediate yes!”

Onboard were 400 people who had paid $10 each to join. The West Australian reported that “seven rail carriages from The Australind service, looking slightly worse for wear, were pulled by a modern A-class diesel locomotive over the route”.

“The day was amazing,” Kevin said.

“We gave passengers streamers to trail out the windows and as we travelled down to Freo there were literally thousands of people lining the tracks waving to the train.

“It got into the news, and we had to add an extra suburban car carriage to our eight-car train due to so many wanting to travel.”

fact file

+ This year’s Christmas tour is sold out. The next Goldfields-Esperance Rail and Coach Tour is in May 2025. Bookings via Tour de Force Travel, Carine: tourdeforce.com.au

+ kevinpearcetours.com.au