The Legendary Ghan by John Borthwick

'They arrive with a ten pound note and one shirt - and they don't change either of them.' The sardonic old publican from Alice Springs in Australia's Northern Territory was referring to the first rail tourists to reach his isolated settlement.The year was 1929.

Since then the legendary train to Alice Springs, known as "The Ghan", has more or less stayed on the rails. I am boarding in Adelaide an air-conditioned reincarnation of that hero of Australian rail lore; fittingly, it is called 'The Legendary Ghan'.

The conductor shows me how my cabin fittings unfold like an origami flower into twin bunks and a disappearing en suite bathroom. With not so much as a shriek of steam, the train pulls away from Adelaide station. Gone, displaced by diesels and modernity, are the days of steam boilers gummed up by desert bore waters and of lines washed-out by flash floods.

As the Ghan rolls past backyards and car yards, then through the greenback fields of wine and wheat north of the city, I begin exploring the train. In the lounge car, where tourists are settling in to being each other's captive audience for the next 22 hours, a more than middle-aged man does a nifty two-step past me, waving a bottle of champagne.

'Gidday.' he chortles.

'Gidday.' I riposte, inventively.

'I'm celebrating. My seventh anniversary.'

'Where's the wife?' I ask.

'That’s it - I'm celebrating being divorced seven years.'

And disappears.

I can see it’s going to be a journey of stories. And why not? A train that runs across the flattest, oldest, driest, hottest, dustiest, deserted-est bit of earth on Earth, Central Australia and names itself after a bloke from Afghanistan, must have a tale to tell.

Around the bar passengers are already swapping versions of "How the Ghan got its name." Common knowledge has it that in the 1860s, some 34 Afghan tribesmen from north-western British India, plus 120 camels, were brought to South Australia to help carry supplies to remote Outback stations. The local predilection for abbreviating names soon truncated 'Afghans' to "'Ghans".

The camels flourished and soon "strings" of up to 70 beasts were criss-crossing Central Australia, opening it up to pastoral settlement. The arrival in the 1920s of the railway spelled the demise of the camel but, ironically, the train that displaced the Afghans itself became known as "The Ghan".

"That's fitting," observes one woman. "But who gave the train its name?"

The most reliable story says that in 1923, when the first train from Adelaide to Oodnadatta pulled into an intermediate station, Quorn, at sunset, an Afghan jumped from the almost empty train and strode to the Mecca end of the platform to say his prayers. The engine driver joked to several onlookers, "Since he's the only passenger on this train, we'll have to call it ‘the Afghan Express’." The name stuck and like everything unnecessary in this desert, its superfluous syllables were soon sloughed off. The train, too, became 'The Ghan'.

Already we're rolling through "one bandicoot per acre" country beyond Port Augusta - just spinifex, saltbush, sand, camel tracks. And the train line - an enormous iron hand span linking pin-points in the Never-Never with obscure names like Pimba, Tarcoola, Manguri, Finke River.

In 1980 Australian National Railways closed the original, flood-prone line (300 km to the east) over which the Ghan had lumbered so tardily that it was known as "the train you can walk faster than" or "the service you can check your watch by" - if the train was on time, you knew your watch was wrong. The two-day, 1555 km journey from Adelaide to Alice might take up to two months. Tales were told of flood-bound trains marooned in the desert for so long that drivers fished in new-born rivers or shot wild goats in order to feed their passengers.

One old-time guard tells me that after a while the Air Force would organise a food drop to the stranded train. "I didn't want to go out there in the scrub searching for the food, and get all muddy. So I organised a competition - free beer for the adult or free lemonade for the kid who brought back the most food after the plane went over. Trouble was the Air Force just used crates, no parachutes. Everything burst. The countryside was covered in plum jam and flour."

'Gidday, again.' says the gent who seats himself beside me in the restaurant car. It's the champagne man. His bubbly is now gone but he seems as happy as ever. He introduces himself as 'Bert - from Darwin. I'm a retired minister.' As part of his work he travelled this region for 30 years.

'You must have ridden the old Ghan?' I ask.

'Couldn't afford to. The bastard was too unreliable. You knew you'd get there - but you never knew when.'

I tell Bert how, in 1971, I rode the original Central Australian line on a train known as 'The Slow Mixed'. Heading from Darwin to Adelaide on spectacularly insufficient means, I travelled in an old wooden caboose hitched to the rear of a jumble of goods wagons and flatbeds - thus the name, 'the mixed train' - for its journey along the fringes of the Simpson and Great Victoria deserts. It took three days - thus 'the slow train' bit.

We were hit by none of the flash floods that could corkscrew the lines into spaghetti; nor were we travelling in summer when the temperature in the carriages could still be as high as 55°C at 2 a.m. Instead, time passed in a miasma of shimmering gibber stones, slumbers, jolts, frayed novels passed around among the passengers, and the sight of Aborigines exiting the train to disappear into what seemed a featureless, creatureless horizon.

At whistle-stops in the night, places which were little more than a water-tank and a brown dog, with curious names like Curdimurka or Birthday or Edwards Creek (known as 'Dodge City', because its inhabitants were inclined to shoot at strangers), passengers would leap from the train and head towards a distant, lighted doorway. While the loco guzzled bore water, we passengers, too, replenished our boilers. The local took off his cap and alongside us drank in honour of the licensing laws and closing times he was obliged to both enforce and ignore.

Somewhere in the night, I awake as we bump to a halt at Tarcoola, a hiccup of bricks and tin in the middle of the desert, named after - what else but - the horse that won the 1893 Melbourne Cup. Here, 723 km and 12 hours out of Adelaide the Central Australian line turns north, away from the east-west Trans Australian line. On the latter, westbound Superfreighters bore like bullets through the blackness of the Nullarbor night, along 478-km of dead-straight rail, the longest in the world. The rails stretch in the starlight optical fibre tethered to some promise beyond the horizon.

Morning comes as a line of low orange fire. Occasional signs of life blur across the screen of my window: trashed cars miles from anywhere; a satellite dish X-rayed by the orange dawn, its stark ribs like a giant butterfly wing. Rains fell several weeks ago, and now the desert tones have flushed to a salmon pink dusted with new green vegetation.

'Do you notice that there aren't any ‘clickety-clack, clickety-clack’ sounds from the rails?' asks Bert at breakfast.

'I did. Why's that?'

'Demon technology. They've got seamless rails these days - no joins. But I miss the old clickety-clack, so I'm going to hop out at the next stop and file a few grooves in the wheels. That should do it.'

I'm also breakfasting with a French train freak and an engineer from Brisbane. The Frenchman assures us that even these seamless rails are very passé by the standards of European high-speed trains.

'Probably so. But enough's enough.' says Bert. 'Who needs a train that fast? I'd hate to arrive before I've left.'

In 1862, when John McDouall Stuart became the first European to cross Australia from south to north, he did so by following Aboriginal migration trails and water sources. A decade later the 2900 km Overland Telegraph to Darwin was constructed along his route. In turn, the Afghan camel teamsters followed the telegraph line, as did, soon after, the Central Australian Railway.

The Ghan line seems to embody an eloquent parable of the accelerated cycle of technology: in little more than half a century, the routes of 40,000 years of nomads had seen an evolution from foot pads to horse trails to camel tracks to telegraph wires and finally to locomotive rails. Yet, even as we muse upon this cycle, our train - of 1170 tonnes, 600 metres length, 3000 horsepower rumbling at 80 km per hour through the Dreamtime lands is, when compared to ballistic trains elsewhere, already a dodo of a loco.

The ochre soils of Australia’s Red Heart flash by. Feral donkeys and kangaroos scatter. As we cross the border into the Northern Territory, I wander back through the sleeper cabins of Holiday Class and then to Coach Class. For distraction, there’s an entertainment car full of video games and poker machines (making this, for some, a 1500 km casino), a buffet car and overhead video screens to ease the eye away from the relentless horizon.

In Coach Class, odd giants ride. Men with blue singlets and much facial hair, whose attention really rides at the tail-end of the train, on the vehicle wagons where their cars sit. Two blokes with illustrated arms, who have loaded on a car that's decorated like a leopard crossed with a zebra, seem to be the spirit of things. In their honour I name this carriage "Tattoo Class".

Soon the Alice approaches. I complete the journey by riding into town in the locomotive. Driver Rod Ellis, a veteran of 28 years on this line, is on his last run. A friendly but taciturn fellow, he volunteers that in retirement, he 'might go for a trip somewhere.'

'A train trip?' I ask.

'Anything but.'

The Legendary Ghan slows, sinuously winding its way through the McDonnell Ranges into Alice Springs. Tourists and train buffs line the route to photograph it. Passengers gather their wits and belongings. The station. Greetings and farewells. The blokes from ‘Tattoo Class’ run the leopard-cum-zebra car off the flatbed wagon and roar away into the Northern Territory heat. Nervous men from the suburbs of Melbourne ease brand-new Land Cruisers down the ramp, wondering how often they can justify their investment by using four-wheel drive on the fully sealed highway to Ayers Rock.

Between me and Adelaide are 2,330,000 railway sleepers. Lost for further stories, I look around at the intense blue Alice sky, as cobalt bright as I remember it almost 30 years ago. Bert appears, as is his wont, from nowhere.

'Have a great trip to the Rock, old boy.' he says.

'You, too, Bert. Have a good one.'

'My oath, yes!'

I've got to say it. 'Bert. At times you don't sound much like a minister.'

He looks around. 'Shsssh, mate. Not so loud. There are three things people hate - used car salesmen, undertakers and politicians.'

'So?'

'I used to be the Minister for Roads in these parts.'

And disappears.