OK look, I know I promised all those weird and wacky job stories, but stuff is happening in the here-and-now which makes much better blog material – or your author has ADD and can only get inspired by things happening in the immediate present.

So as I write this, I’m seated comfortably on the 5:45pm train from Bungendore to Sydney, and having a thoroughly good time. All there is to do is sit with music in my ears and watch the country unfold outside my window.

The stretch from Bungendore to Tarago: gently rolling hills, topped with a long skein of lofty windfarms, rotors lazily turning in the late afternoon sunshine. It’s dramatic – golden hour light with dark brooding clouds as a backdrop.

Alongside the track is a rushing creek, whose course we’re following through the hills. It’s flanked by old trees and younger willows, all with that vivid spring foliage, and the grassy hills rise steeply around, scored with sheep tracks down to the water. Imagine the kingfishers, the platypuses! My camera finger itches.

Sheep are everywhere, studding the rich green paddocks, lambs frolicking just as legend would have it. They glow in the sunshine.

Birds wheeling in bunches: swallows, magpies, galahs. Did I see a black-shouldered kite, white against a belt of dark evergreens?

And just after Tarago, surprised by a stately mansion, stone-built like a Highlands manor house.

A little girl with strawberry hair and blue eyes is playing peek-a-boo between the seats in front of me. Her mother reprimands her in Russian.

Then cattle country — healthy, glossy light-brown beeves and calves clearly delighted with the abundant fodder the rains have grown for them.

Toward Goulburn, the countryside is turned and tilled, with spoil heaps and unidentifiable diggings and scars – at least, that’s what you see from the train.

You read so much about small towns in the US dying as the young move away and the high streets are replaced by malls and big-box stores. The UK’s high streets are also suffering from IKEA-isation. I wonder if the Goulburns in this sparsely-populated land are under similar pressure?

Outside Goulburn we pass through a belt of those large red-brick buildings that seem to accompany railways, built in their 19th-century heyday to service the needs of steam. A superannuated signal box, sheds, workshops, all empty. Then rows of pretty settler cottages, dainty and cute. And a belt of more modern homes before we pass the prison on its hill. All those lives going on oblivious of the eyes watching from the passing train.

The hills here are higher, shaggy with native trees. We follow the course of the river – broad and very full, brown with silt. The piers of an old bridge, red brick and weathered with moss — more Victorian industrial architecture.

All the stations follow a similar Federation model, with elegantly curved wrought-iron roof supports, fretted daggerboards, and . . . finials! All are smartly uniformed in dark reddish-brown and cream, with dark-blue benches. And all seem well-maintained and clean.

Dusk is descending. We’re under lowering clouds now, which swamp the hilltops. Two VW Beetles and a ute rusting away under a tree. Our route is following the old Hume Highway through farming country – you can see rows of post boxes at the road junctions, every one different.

We cross and re-cross the river, which is wider and darker every time. So much water everywhere.

The odd white-flowering bush atop the cuttings we pass through. A quarry with gantries and cone-shaped piles of gravel, pale sterile spoil heaps.

And a roo! A really big one, wearily pushing along at a crouch.

We’re rushing through forests now, picking up speed. Every now and then there’s a green clearing through the trees with a farmhouse on it, accompanied by its family of outbuildings and water tanks.

It’s nearly dark. The trees lean spookily over the track, pale trunks contorting in the gloom.

We’re in commuting range of Sydney, falling into its intractable gravitational pull. I can see dirt roads pale through the trees, but no lights anywhere.

Approaching Bundanoon. Prosperous cottages and well-kept gardens; a grand gate with new stone-built piers, glowing yellow lights atop each. Green orderly meadows. White plank fences like New England.

And it’s night. Bundanoon station’s narrow platform is hemmed by dark trees. Yellow ligts and a mock-Tudor pub, dim through the black branches.

It’s so dark all I can see is the reflection of my laptop screen in the window and the blank lenses of my glasses.

And what should come up in my earbuds? ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’ . . . Gladys never sounded so controlled, building, pushing it out a little more as the intensity grows. The Pips give counterpoint in perfect unison, delivering the first ‘whoo whoo’ as Gladys states, “I’d rather live in his world / Than live without him in mine.” There are soaring strings, stabbing horns, steadily burbling bass, but it’s spare, with lots of space for the vocal – a powerful outpouring of passion.  

No stopping at Exeter. The train slows again, so as not to disturb the millionaires on their rolling forested estates. Moss Vale is just darkness studded with lights – the occasional cosy domestic scene through windows close to the track. A floodlit tennis court. Harvey Norman, Kennard’s – illuminated signs before the night descends again.

Bowral, home of the Don Bradman museum and lovely homewares emporia, antiques markets and boho boutiques. Now very dark. My little Russian friend has succumbed to sleep.

Mittagong. People board in gold-trimmed tracksuits, carrying Louis Vuitton bags. Some watch Netflix on iPads. And then it’s nearly an hour until Campbelltown — suburban Sydney — and we gather speed through the cloaking darkness. The odd station flashes by, brightly lit, before we’re back at the bottom of the deep black ocean again.

A long, dark, diesel-smelling interlude where the overheated coach brings on nodding snoozes. But the small stations flickering by become more frequent, and then there are roads alight with cars, a bridge over the line with trucks hurrying over it, and then parallel tracks with Sydney’s big yellow-and-grey double-decker trains. We have penetrated Sydney’s outer rings.

Slowly now, with bigger stations sliding by. Creaks and groans from the train as the throbbing diesel idles, sending vibration through the carriages. As we get closer we get slower. Will we ever arrive?

Outside it’s all warehouses, bus parks, high-rise flats. Sullen yellow lights at the windows and sodium glare at the roadsides. The sky is invisible – it’s a nocturnal world of hard surfaces and dull reflections. On we chug. People pack up their gear, looking expectant. Slower and slower, everyone standing, poised. We stop — it’s Sydney.