Aug 20, 2025 River, Town
We started our first full day in Albury with a walk along the Murray river, a short distance from our B&B. It was a glorious sunny, warm day.
We came to an observation bench where we could see a colony of several hundred flying foxes hanging in a small group of trees, looking like dark pendulous fruit. The phone/camera photos did not do justice to the scene, so here is the information provided at the site.
We then backtracked into town and walked through the CBD (Central Business District) and admired the mid 19th century architechture. The lower picture is of the Albury train station.
The Albury train station has the distinction of having the longest passenger platform in Australia, due to the fact that trains had to stop there to change carriages because the railway tracks in Victoria were not the same gauge as those in New South Wales! The tracks were not synchronized to standard gauge until 1962! Even Mark Twain thought this was ludicrous;
“In his book Tramps Abroad, writer Mark Twain in 1895 wrote of the break of gauge at Albury and changing trains: “Now comes a singular thing, the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the most unaccountable marvel that Australia can show. At the frontier between NSW and Victoria our multitude of passengers were routed out of their snug beds by lantern light in the morning in the biting cold to change cars. Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth, imagine the boulder it emerged from, on some petrified legislator’s shoulders.”[45]“