Why I kept my blinds open at night on this magical Australian train journey

My first sight of the Great Southern, the so-called "summer train", is through a rain-splashed coach window. Crew member Sebastian is talking us through what happens next. He's at the front of the bus and dressed top to toe in Australiana - an Akubra on his head, and bespoke threads from R.M. Williams. The coach will pull up alongside our Gold Premium class carriages, he tells us - and we'll offload quickly in the rain, followed by our luggage which will be brought to our cabins.

Already, the day is a few hours old. Check-in opened at 7am at Hanworth House, a 160-year-old homestead in East Brisbane, built for the city's first port master (and rebuilt after a 2013 arson attack, we learned). Three-tiered stands piled with pastries were set before us, and a coffee station pumped out flat whites and cappuccinos. They were serving champagne, too, while a live musician strummed his guitar and sang easy listening tunes.

It set the scene for what lies ahead: Australian history and landscape will shape this three-night Journey Beyond land voyage from Brisbane to Adelaide; there will be live music on and off the train; and we will be fed extraordinarily well.

At 11.24am, the train creaks into action. It's 711 metres long with 28 carriages and two locomotives, 183 passengers and 38 crew. Less than 15 minutes later it seems Brisbane is behind us - it's all bush out my picture window, then houses on big blocks, then lime green hills and scattered trees, as we barrel our way at an average speed of 85kmh through south-east Queensland and into NSW, where a spectacular dinner awaits.

It's just before 7pm at Coffs Harbour, and waiters bearing champagne and canapes line our passage towards Charlesworth Bay Beach. There, Gumbaynggirr man Matthew Flanders sits upon the sand not far from the water's edge, playing the didgeridoo. Its sounds bounce around the beach as the sky takes on its pastel sunset hues. In a welcome to country, Matthew talks about the importance of the ocean to his people. "The ocean remembers me," he says and his sign-off is warm: "Have a wonderful evening, and a happy life."

Soon we are seated just beyond the dunes at long rows of tables, fairy lights strung back and forth above us, and busy waiters moving among us. They bear a feast of hyperlocal bounty. It starts with prawns caught off this very stretch of NSW Mid North Coast, and oysters from Nambucca just south of here. Then comes local black Angus eye fillet, and line-caught snapper that was swimming around just this morning.

Passengers chat in the mild evening air while sipping wines from the Hunter Valley and Orange in NSW, and the Murray Darling in Victoria. At our table is a couple who have just been cat-sitting for their daughter in Brisbane, and are taking the train home to Adelaide; they've been on the Ghan, too. Chris the hubby is a train enthusiast. They're not the only passengers I chat to over the journey who are working through the set of great Australian train trips. The Ghan, the Indian Pacific and now the Great Southern, which has been operating only since 2019. They're being ticked off bucket lists - including by British visitors who are in Australia for the Test cricket. These trains have a way of getting under the skin, clearly. And while this is billed as a luxury train trip, it has something of the rough and ready about it, too. In fact, it's far from a smooth ride.

It's a few minutes past midnight and I can't be sure what particular sound has woken me up. There are so many. The summer train squeals, groans, wails and shudders, and sometimes shrieks too, as only metal grinding against metal can. We're passing through Macksville, south of Nambucca Heads, and I can make out through the window the ghostly outlines of trees and winking farmhouse lights. Just after 5am, I'm awake again. My phone tells me we're at Mount George. It's on NSW's North Coast railway line, not far from Taree.

The moon glows and the sun is just starting to emerge. You do have the option of blinds, but I choose every night to sleep with them open. I forgo available earplugs, too. And while my slumber might be fitful as a result, I couldn't care less. I love waking in the night to peer into the darkness - although it's never completely dark; there's always something to see - and wonder at the cacophony, inevitably lulled back to sleep by the bumping, swaying rhythms of this moody mechanical beast.

The menu for our first two-course breakfast, like all the menus in our Gold Premium dining carriage, features an item of produce artistically rendered on its front. This morning it's a blood orange; tonight, saltbush; tomorrow, bush tomato; then beetroot, and so forth. The focus is on cooking with produce from the landscapes the Great Southern is moving through. The on-board culinary team, the menu informs us, works closely with local farmers and providores. And we learn that nothing on board will be deep fried, or cooked on an open flame, or put in a sous vide - such methods don't pass the safety test in small galley kitchens on moving trains.

Yet, the breadth and quality of what comes out of those squishy kitchens into the dining cars is remarkable. There's a four-course dinner each night, a procession of immaculately presented dishes such as grilled smoked duck breast with merlot plums (we're at a standstill on a side-track in Lidcombe in Sydney's west, waiting for a freight train to pass through, as I eat that one) and sumac battered brinjals on a pea and parmesan risotto (that's the next and final night, as we're travelling through the Victorian countryside on the way to Adelaide, flicking through the rich grazing lands of the Western District).

Please, stop feeding us, you might want to yell. But of course you won't, because it's such a highlight, even if you don't quite finish every course.

After Coffs Harbour, there are two more stops at which everyone heads off on excursions, with a selection of four to choose from at each destination, all included in the fare. From the historic train station at Maitland in the Hunter Valley, I'm among the contingent bound for Nelson Bay for a catamaran cruise around Port Stephens - a natural harbour more than twice the size of Sydney's. Today the water is as calm as it gets, our captain tells us, and the sun is shining, too. These waters teem with wildlife - turtles, fairy penguins, rays, seals, dolphins; in fact, there are 150 resident Indo-Pacific bottlenosed dolphins in Port Stephens and we see several of them, including a nursery pod swimming at the headlands.

My favourite pozzie might well be the couch in my twin cabin (which becomes my bottom-bunk bed at night), where I love to just put my feet up and watch south-east Australia pass by. I honestly don't know, with all my stuff strewn around in semi-organised chaos, how two people fit in this Gold Premium cabin, which also has a compact ensuite. Plenty aboard, however, are making it work. There's more space in Platinum Class and this year, the summer train also has the new, much roomier, uber luxe Aurora Australis suites, which come with butler service and in-suite dining.

Right now, the summer train is still in its other guise - the famous Ghan, shooting through the red, rugged heart of Australia between Adelaide and Darwin. Come December, for three months, the Ghan's rolling stock is repurposed as the Great Southern. You might almost imagine this epic, storied, hardworking train looking forward to the change of scenery.

The writer was a guest of Journey Beyond