Gents - Thanks for the nominations of other courses split by a rail line. I did qualify it as "great" course to try to ensure "unique" wasn't incorrect. Maybe I should have also said "active" rail line.
Andrew - I love those little aspects of a club's culture. Unfortunately due to a packed schedule while I was in town I didn't linger at RAGC after my round, but all I experienced there and all I have heard before and after tells me it is a club that truly "gets it". It would be a great home club were it not for the fact it's in Adelaide!
Philip - Sadly not. I visited in October as my wife's +1 on a work junket.
John - I didn't seek approval, but in the past I've gotten away with threads praising RGD's magnificent renovation work (to wit:
Royal Melbourne (East),
Pasatiempo, so I'm hoping this one might be okay, too!
Here's what's really exciting for Royal Adelaide:There may not be another course in the world that is so architecturally strong and on such enviable terrain and soil that also has so many obvious, simple points for improvement.
The mounds inside the dogleg on the 1st, the saucer drive bunkers on the 5th, the drive bunkering at the 8th (how great is that green?!), the fugly mounding behind the 9th green, perhaps returning the 17th to the character of the rest of the course (though in isolation it is a really good hole) and those Thommo bunkers on the 18th.
The combination of a club that gets it and a consulting architect who has a track record of nailing this kind of thing (for example 6, 7, 15 at RM East) is a really fantastic arrangement and it should mean great things for RAGC.