Riding Rails At The Lachlan Valley Railway Heritage Centre

Does every small town in Australia have a railway museum? That's a rhetorical question. Cowra still has an open, working small train station and an old roundhouse museum a few blocks away. Best of both worlds for any train buff.

Facade of the train station, designed in the usual Gothic Rail style.

Down at the Lachlan Valley Railway Heritage Centre, Rosie is hanging out. If you get de-railed by all the interesting engineering the mighty Harman crane can assist.

Cool car, a mobile classroom for training train techs. Know your connectors!

Ye olde time travel. The number of your sleeping compartment. Alas, only a ceiling fan, no cool A/C. First class with big, leather seats.

Roundhouse turntable and future projects. The typical train museum is always a labor of love of a few volunteers in a race against the rust.

Japanese POW Camp And Cemetery In Cowra

Australia housed about 1,000 Japanese soldiers in a POW camp in Cowra during WWII. The camp started in 1941 as a place for Italian prisoners and, in 1943, added Japanese prisoners. It's infamous for a Japanese breakout in 1944 that resulted in 231 Japanese prisoners being killed along with about five Australian soldiers.

The POW site, what's left of it, has been preserved and there is a Japanese cemetery nearby, recognizing the 231 Japanese prisoners killed.

The entrance to the Japanese cemetery, a separate section of the larger town cemetery.

Memorial marker and rows of prisoner names. It's a nice, understated, solemn design.

At the POW site, a pavilion with information panels acts as an introductory overlook to the area.

Recreation of a guard tower. A four panel tribute to the four types of groups at the camp: Australian guards, Japanese and Italian prisoners and Indonesian mothers with children. The Indonesian families were related to political unrest back home and a Dutch agreement with Australia to take the people related to labor strikes.

Tangible evidence of the camp is reduced to scattered piles of concrete, foundations for various buildings that made up the complex.