Cover image courtesy of the National Library of Australia, The Kalgoorlie Express as Bullabulling in the 1930s
There are several races on the annual calendar that are as old as the hills and generically named, and Western Australia’s G1 Railway S. is one of them. It wasn’t named after a racehorse, so it’s safe to assume it was named after a railway which, in 1887, was still a novelty in Australia’s ‘wild west’.
That year, the city of Perth was blossoming and it had several short railway lines already crisscrossing its suburbs, but the most significant one in the state of Western Australia that year was the opening of the ‘Kalgoorlie Express’, a dedicated passenger service between Perth and Kalgoorlie.
Kalgoorlie railway station in the early 1900s | Image courtesy of Transwa
At the time, the Kalgoorlie service wasn’t officially named. It was called the Kalgoorlie Express by many, the ‘Kalgoorlie Passenger’ by some, and to others, it was the ‘Eastern Goldfields Express’. To everyone though, it was the first of the vast state’s overnight train services, trundling from the Indian Ocean to the beating heart of Australia’s gold mining industry.
The service was opened in December 1887, the exact month and year that saw the inaugural running of the Western Australia Turf Club (WATC) Railway S. The race took place on New Year’s Eve, 1887, on the same card as the Perth Cup and, as a handicap run over nine furlongs (1800 metres), it was restricted to western-bred horses.
The winner was the 3-year-old Nimrod, whose breeding isn’t recorded in the Australian Stud Book. He carried just over 41kg to victory in a four-horse field, purse of 50 sovereigns, and he was a ‘grand little horse who may do greater things for it is not certain that he was not, by any means, in tiptop racing trim’.
Nimrod didn’t go on to greater things, but he would always be the inaugural winner of the WATC Railway S. and, as the years went on and the Kalgoorlie Express continued to rattle its way across the desert, the race evolved too.
Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie's main strip, in 1915 | Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia
In 1895, it was opened to horses bred outside of Western Australia and, in 1922, its distance was changed to a mile. It remained part of the Perth summer carnival until 2001 when it was moved back to November, and aside from a few shuffles here and there, it has remained ever since.
In 1979, the Railway S. assumed Group 1 status and its modern winners have included the likes of Better Loosen Up in 1989 and homegrown Northerly (Serheed {USA}) in 2000. Its local winners have very often been sensational, multiple Group-winning horses of the like of Asian Beau, Hardrada (Marooned {GB}) and Artesian (Argonaut {GB}).
It’s not a certainty that the Railway S. is named after the Kalgoorlie Express, but it’s likely that its significance at the time (and it would have generated much chatter) played a part in the race’s creation.
The trainline was the start of true interior passenger-train services, and it was hauled by a Pr-class steam locomotive for 51 years until 1938, and thereafter replaced by a clunkier, diesel-fuelled X-class locomotive, The Westland.
The Westland | Image courtesy of the Westland Museum of Perth
With Kalgoorlie opened up to a daily, overnight train service from the state's capital, the township exploded with human activity. In this wild and curious place, it was the ‘lust after gold which converts the desert into a populous region, fills the remote and sterile corners of the earth with the machinery of civilisation, builds cities as if by magic, and stirs into a whirl of feverish activity every ramification of human industry’.
