Loongana sits at the western threshold of a record that has no real rival. The straight section, beginning near here between Nurina and Loongana, measures 478 kilometres, the longest perfectly straight stretch of railway anywhere on Earth. It is not, however, level. The land beneath rises and dips in long shallow swells, so a driver can watch the headlight of an approaching train wink below the curve of the world before the train itself appears, minutes later, still impossibly far away. On a line this straight, distance stops behaving the way it does anywhere else.

Loongana was never a town in any ordinary sense. It began as a lime mine with a processing plant, a cluster of railway cottages, and the people needed to keep the track in repair. Out here, nothing arrived by road. Everything came by rail, including the water, the mail, and the groceries, delivered by the legendary Tea and Sugar Train that worked its slow way along the Nullarbor sidings until it was withdrawn in 1996. When the supply train stopped coming, the reason for a settlement largely stopped with it. The cottages that once housed the maintenance crews have since been demolished.

The Indian Pacific still passes through, the only passenger service that runs the entire Trans-Australian line between Perth and Sydney. But it does not stop at Loongana anymore. It slides past at speed, a long silver thread crossing a plain so empty that the train can feel like the only moving object in the world. For the handful of people who keep the railway running, the passing of the Indian Pacific is less an arrival than a kind of weather, predictable, brief, and gone again into the shimmer of the eastern straight.

The name Nullarbor comes from Latin, nullus arbor, no trees, and the plain earns it. There is no shade here, no river, no relief from a sky that fills the entire view. Summer heat hammers the limestone; winter nights turn sharply cold. What the surface hides is just as strange as what it shows: beneath this treeless tabletop runs one of the world's great cave systems, dark rivers of air and ancient water threading through the rock. Above ground, though, Loongana offers only the essentials of survival and the company of a railway that never quite leaves and never quite stays.