Reid was established in 1916, while the Trans-Australian Railway was still being hammered together across the Nullarbor, and it took its name from Sir George Reid, who had served as Australia's fourth prime minister from 1904 to 1905. It is a curious habit of this railway: out on the emptiest terrain in the country, the sidings carry the names of the men who once ran the nation - Reid, Deakin, Cook, Hughes - a roll-call of early prime ministers scattered across hundreds of kilometres of saltbush. There was nothing prime-ministerial about the place itself. Reid was a working settlement on a working line, and its dignity came from the labour done there, not the name above the door.

In the age of steam, a locomotive crossing the Nullarbor was a thirsty, hungry machine, and Reid existed to feed it. About a dozen railway families lived here, and most of the breadwinners spent their days refreshing engines with water and coal and keeping the track itself in repair. The water tanks beside the line were as vital as anything in town. Where there are families, there are children, and where there are children, there must be a school - so Reid had one, a single-teacher schoolhouse that in 1954 still had pupils enough to fill it. A teacher who worked there left behind photographs of those students, lined up and squinting in the desert light, the only faces that survive from a town now gone.

The thing that killed Reid was not drought or disaster but efficiency. When diesel locomotives arrived in 1951, the calculus of the railway changed overnight. A diesel engine did not need coaling stations strung every few dozen kilometres; the whole line could be served by a single fuel stop. The water - now needed only for the passenger carriages, not the engines - mattered less and less. Reid's reason for existing began to evaporate. The settlement clung on into the 1970s, when even track maintenance went mechanised, and then continuously welded rail and pre-stressed concrete sleepers made the old hand-labour obsolete. The jobs went. The families followed. There was nothing cruel in it, only the quiet arithmetic of a railway that no longer needed people standing in the heat to keep it alive.

The buildings were demolished, and by 2019 only a few scattered remnants remained on the plain - a concrete pad here, a rusted fitting there, the ghost of a township you could walk past without noticing. The Indian Pacific still rolls through, but it does not stop, and the passengers gazing out at the saltbush have no reason to know that a school once stood within sight of the track. Reid belongs now to the long list of Nullarbor sidings that flickered into being for the railway and faded when the railway changed its mind. The dust that once threatened the cottages has, in the end, simply taken the ground back.