The Midnight Express
Adventure
The Midnight Express is a free, NAPLAN-aligned adventure writing resource for Australian primary students. It includes a story starter, complication, tiered vocabulary and scaffolds mapped to the Australian Curriculum (AC9).
The old train sat still on the rusted tracks, its black engine glistening under the pale moonlight. Moss clung to the metal, as if the forest had tried to claim it long ago. A distant owl hooted, and the wind whispered through the trees. No one had seen this train in years—or so the town’s stories said. But tonight, as the clock struck midnight, the whistle let out a long, eerie wail. The wheels shuddered. The train was waking up.
The complication
- The train starts moving—where is it going, and who is driving it?
- The passengers on board don’t seem… normal.
- The only way to stop the train is to solve a riddle given by a mysterious conductor.
What's in the full resource
- Complications
- Brainstorming Prompts
- Vocabulary Support
- Sentence Starters
- Dialogue Prompts
- Writing Challenges
- Sentence Variety
- Creative Twists
- Writing Checklist
- Reflective Questions
- Collaborative Writing Ideas
- Printable teacher and student PDFs
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