My Australian rail journey...
Great Southern Rail is this year celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Ghan’s route across Australia. Julie Baxter stepped aboard
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my journey
E
On track to tales of the Telegraph Line
mail us’. ‘Text soon’. ‘Tweet your photos’. No-one expects postcards
from your travels any longer but they certainly want to follow your every move!
As I headed down under, the myriad ways to communicate resounded around the departure lounge. We’ve come to take instant communications for granted it seems, but as my journey aboard The Ghan was to show, it was not always so. The iconic train’s route runs from Adelaide in South Australia to Darwin in the Northern Territory (or vice versa) – that’s pretty much the entire length of the continent and the journey takes three days.
The route is an historic one and has a story which stretches back to the earliest pioneer
days.The track follows the route of the
Australian Overland Telegraph Line – 3200km of telegraph line completed in 1872 to allow the fi rst ‘fast’ communication between Australia and the rest of the world. Now, when I say fast, I’m not talking
has been operating from Adelaide and Alice since 1929. As I join my fellow passengers sipping perfectly-chilled
Barossa Semillon in the train’s cosy lounge bar, the scale of the challenge faced by those telegraph and railway pioneers soon becomes clear.
The train line joins the dots of those original relay stations and our route quickly swaps cosmopolitan Adelaide’s suburbs for the dramatic landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Blue skies set off the purple hues of the range, underlined
by the greens and yellows of the vast farmlands we are cutting though. The Flinders stretches for 950 sq km and is famed for its red ochre, but it is the wealth of lush foliage that really marks it out, dotted as it is with red river gums, black bush and mallee trees, black oaks and yellow umbrella wattle. Cutting the trail was far from easy for the pioneers. They
were pushing into the heart of Australia, battling a harsh and diffi cult terrain, wrestling the mighty power of nature in a constant round of dramatic fi res, fl oods and droughts.
The fantastic hospitality of the “The fabulous
food and wine is unquestionably a highlight of the train for many”
The Ghan is named after the Afghan cameleers who traded here
fi bre-optic fast or 4G wizardry. These were the days when it took a pioneer four months to send a message home and another four to receive a reply. The telegraph line transformed this, with a succession of relay stations passing messages, in morse code, across the continent, up through Indonesia and onwards to Britain in ‘just’ two days. The telegraph line proved an immediate success, opening up the Territory, bringing gold discoveries and triggering the development of Alice Springs as an invaluable starting point for explorers going west. The train line
followed, and The Ghan
train’s staff begins immediately. We are welcomed aboard by our cabin steward who guides us through the clever features of our two- bunk cabin and ensuite, before ushering us to the Queen Adelaide Restaurant car for the fi rst of many superb meals.
With 31 carriages and 250 passengers, The Ghan has three restaurant carriages served by three kitchens, and each departure has four chefs plus a minor army of attentive staff. With bright white linen tablecloths and napkins, cut glass and silverware, the restaurant lays on the style. Tenderised pork with macadamia and sage crunch sits alongside pumpkin and saltbush lasagne on the dinner menu; while handmade goat’s cheese tartlets or marinated chicken breasts on pickled fi g and pistachio couscous battled for our attention at lunch. The menus are mouthwatering, with up to six choices of mains each time we dine. Outside the window, cattle stations, up to 21,000 acres in size, pass by or we spot termite hills – up to fi ve metres high. The scenery is incredible and, contrary to expectations, is constantly changing. We scan the huge wide
Iron man sculpture en route
sellingtravel.co.uk
My Magical Moments AND SO TO BED...
Snuggling down in my cosy bunk was an unexpected thrill. Immersed in crisp cottons, the gentle rocking of the train lulled me to sleep until morning dawned full of anticipation for what new landscapes would now be revealed behind the blinds.
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