With varying degrees of validity, many cultural experiences bill themselves as “immersive” these days. Sound Tracks – a limited-edition music festival that takes a steam train to regional Victorian destinations – does not employ the word. But hopping on at Melbourne’s Southern Cross station with retro boarding pass in hand feels as immersive as stepping into a dream.
This is the first of three train trips planned in the initiative; we’re headed to Charlton, just over 200km north-west of Melbourne. For the next three days, a mixed bag of music fans and train enthusiasts – all of whom managed to snap up tickets within 20 minutes – inhabit this locomotive. It’s like a school camp gone surreal. When we board, carriage by carriage, on Friday night, there’s an authentic mustiness to the train which infiltrates the clothes as soundly as the trip will infiltrate the psyche, and which the single cardboard air freshener hanging in one corridor cannot hope to dispel.
