Story 15. Birthday Siding

Every months or so our order of explosives would arrive via train.
The railway ran mostly along side the national Highway, it wound its way across the barren and uninteresting countryside scooting around the larger saltlakes it squeezed between the many small ones as it meandered northward.
The National railway would notify the mine of a shipment of explosives by phone, information would be passed on when the two or more freight wagons would be uncoupled and left at the closest railway siding.
Birthday Siding was ten or so km south of the Mt Gunson turn off and quite near the turnoff to Oakden Hills, a local sheep property to the west, marked by two rocky haystacks that poked about 150 meters above the landscape, Oakden Hills was one of two sheep station properties the mine lease straddled, the other, Pernatty Station, was also the name of a large salt lake just to the east of the mine.

Being notified by the national railways of the delivery of two or three hundred ton of explosives could at best only be used as a general guide, the shipment could arrive anytime from the actual day of notification to up to ten days later.
Sometimes when returning to site the railway wagons would be seen parked at the unattended siding in the open, looking abandoned on the side track just three hundred meters from the national highway, unlocked, unsecured while the mine site waited notification of the expected arrival of it latest shipment.