Mining Country and Road Trains

Thursday 28th May
As we are leaving Kalgoorlie I have to admit that it is a very neat and tidy town. One thing I found very different are Kalgoorlie's public toilets. We visited three in total - No.1 was in the center of town, run by the Council with a user pay system - $0.35 for adults, $0.25 for kids - and a check-out-chick complete with cash register. However, they do not accept credit cards!
No.2 toilet was a super modern stainless steel cubicle with no door handles and an electronic control system. Three light indicators for "vacant", "occupied" and "cleaning" and a "Open" button . After every use the toilet cleans (and probably blow dries) itself and then its ready for the next user. The street access to No.3 was blocked off by high cast iron bars and to get access one had to go into the shop next door and out their side door and then around the corner to the toilet. There appear be no freely accessible old style public toilets the way you find them in any other Australian town.

From Kal' we headed north to Menzies, Leonora and Leinster. This area is full of mines mainly Gold and the roads are wide and straight and populated by Road Trains and many other mining related vehicles. As remote as this area appears, the remnants of mankind are ever present with rubbish strewn all along the roadside. However, all of this changed when turned west at Leinster to head towards Sandstone. No more rubbish and very few vehicles. I think in an hours driving (at 100km/h) I counted 2 cars and 2 road trains coming the other way.
The Road Trains (see picture above) have between 2 and 4 trailers, are somewhere between 50mt and 70mt long, and transport Diesel to the mine sites and mined materials between mine and processing site. Each trailer has 6 axles with a total of 24wheels, plus another 4 on the truck. A four trailer road train has a total of 100 wheels - that's a lot of rubber and steel.
When the road train gets onto the road shoulder and then straightens up again, the last trailer swings about 1mt from side to side.

We pulled into a little place called Sandstone to fill up - the service station wasn't hard to find but there was no one there and it had no office building attached - just a couple of bowsers with a tin roof (see photo right hand side). The pumps had padlocks on them and I couldn't quite work out how to purchase fuel. Across the road there was the General Store which is also the Post Office, the only shop in town. After a little while the proprietor came over, took the padlocks of and filled up our car in good old fashioned "Service" station style. As the pumps were the old mechanical type, he then wrote the Dollar amount on a piece of paper which I took across the road to pay the lady in the General Store. I don't think I have seen a service station where someone actually serves customers for over 20 years!
We parked in the main street, had lunch and then proceeded another 150km further west to Mount Magnet where we arrived just on 5pm. Again, very few cars on a superb road which has 2 wide lanes and a two lane wide spoon drain either side. We saw Emu's, Goats, Sheep and plenty of Eagles where there was fresh road kill.
On the subject of road kill - the road from Kal' to Leinster (over 300km) had at least one dead animal (mainly Roo's) per km, some sections even more, ranging in condition from fresh to skeleton.
Today was our biggest travel day yet, with a total of 700km covered. We left Kal' at 9am and arrived at Mt Magnet at 5pm with only a 1/2hr lunch stop and 2 fuel stops along the way.