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The train between Adelaide and Darwin reveals how immense, how vast, how achingly, stunningly wide and endless is the Australian desert.

Flying by plane across Australia, the red sandhills and steamy gibber plains (Aussie for our stony desert) fade out of memory, for they are sighted in sporadic bursts via the craning of my neck. By bus....well, the thought of cramming my family into a moving sardine can for 40 hours through the desert is a thought worth pushing away before it frightens me. No, this is train country. Where train tracks converge into a black speck on a horizon, you don’t worry about getting to your destination too quickly and can relax, melting into a rhythm of gentle rocking and rolling. Everything is ‘away there somewhere’.

This is a great experience for families. Barring toddlers who simply would not like being so contained, it’s a great way to see a lot of countryside in comfort. In between points of interest, it is, of course, useful to have thing for kids to do such as drawing, puzzles and games.

The oddest sights roll by. There's the ‘Iron Man,’ a statue of a railway worker created by the men who built the track appearing as a lonely guardian figure. Then a low-lying mountain (yes, mountains in the desert) breaks up the long horizontal line separating blue sky and red soil. The colors are dazzling, almost as shiny as the outside of the metal train: intense reds from rock and soil, skies brushed with shades of blue from delicate eggshell to blue black, and shiny greens from light emerald to dark olive clothe the plants, skeletal bushes and stunted trees that crackle and whisper in the desert wind.

Face to Face with the Past

Then we see it...the largest animal in Australia. A wild camel looks lazily at the silver bullet rushing by and when the camel looks at The Ghan, it is looking at the legends woven by its ancestors. In the 1800’s, the ‘Outback’ of Australia experienced by Europeans was a wild frontier with very few transport options. They needed a way to to travel the desert. Camel trains were the only way to get supplies and mail to the outlying pastoral stations, great cattle and sheep farms stretching for thousands of square miles.

Cameleers, brought out from Central Asia, including Afghanistan, all soon wore the title ‘Afghans’. These hardy men with camels opened up the harsh vast desert regions of South and Central Australia, allowing more settlements, people and other developments such as roads to follow and so passed into legend.

Finally a railway, in a 3-foot-6-inch narrow gauge track laid in the 1920’s, stretched from Adelaide on the southern coast to Alice Springs, a town in the center of Australia. It passed well to the east of the current rail route and bore the title the Afghan Express in honour of these legendary men. Like many Australian words, over time Afghan was shortened to the simpler ‘Ghan’.

The original train took two days to get to the center of Australia. Traveling the Ghan was an adventure and an experience into unreliability for, unfortunately, the railway tracks passed through flood plains. When it rains in the Outback, it pours heavily and the usually dry rivers suddenly flood. The steam-hauled Ghan would have to wait the rains out, stuck in a place for hours or even days.

Finally, in 1980, a new track was laid with termite-proof sleepers (railroad ties in the US) running through far more stable country to central Australia. An extension to Darwin on the north coast finally opened two years ago. The figures are staggering. Taking 30 months to complete at a cost of $AUD1.3billion, the extension involved laying two million sleepers, constructing 93 bridges and using 100,000 tonnes of pre-stressed concrete. All this in harsh, unforgiving, desert and in intense unrelenting heat. However, the extension has meant that Australia is unique in having a long distance transcontinental ride in both directions - The Ghan train 3000 kilometers north and south and the Indian Pacific train, 4000 kilometers east to west.