The old Ghan is gone

Press, 27 November 1980, Page 11

The old Ghan is gone

By an A.AT. correspondent, Paul Reid, through NZPA ' Adelaide The old Ghan had neither the glamour nor speed of some of the world’s most-famous trains. Where the fabled Orient Express reputedly had spies as thick as flies, the Ghan just had the flies. Where the Flying Scotsman and Japan’s Bullet built their reputations on speed, the Ghan was best known for arriving late. Anything from one or two hours to three months late. . But then the Flying Scotsman did not run on light rails laid across dry creek beds with little or no ballast that corkscrewed in floods, buckled in 50 deg. heat or were buried by sand drifts. Those were the hazards which faced every engineer who drove the Ghan across the deserts of South Australia and the Northern Territory between Marree and Alice Springs in the last 50 years, on a line which took almost that long to build.

They were also what gave a trip on the old Ghan an atmosphere of history and adventure which is unlikely to be recreated on the service which will run on the

more reliable replacement line between Tarcoola and Alice Springs, further to the west

The Ghan left Adelaide for the last time on Monday. The old line was built across country trodden by explorers, by John McDougall Stuart, who made the first crossing of Australia from south to north, and by Charles Sturt; by the men who defied torturous conditions to build the Overland Telegraph Line and by the teams of Afghan cameleers who carried cargoes between outback settlements in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland. The train took its abbreviated name from those Afghan pioneers, although there are conflicting accounts of how, when and why it first came to be used.

The original northern line started at Port Augusta, on the shores of Spencer Gulf. The last working section of the old narrowgauge track begins at Marree — known as Hergott Springs when the Afghans used it as their base but later changed because of anti-German feeling after the First World War. Marree marks one end of the Birdsville Track from Queensland. From there the line

travels north to the onepub town of William Creek, then Oodnadatta, Finke and finally Alice Springs, a distance of 870 km.

Derailments have been a common cause of delays over the years. In latter times they became so frequent that a railway engineer, Des Smith, had to place a speed limit of 40k.p.h. on the line, dropping to 10k.p.h. in places. At times the train was forced to move more slowly than that to negotiate very bad sections. When the heat did not buckle the light rails, flash floods broke and twisted them. The water courses that saved the early explorers and made it possible for steam trains to cross the desert also caused havoc for Ghan timetables.

Monsoon rains in the Lake Eyre catchment area from December to February regularly turn dusty creek beds into raging torrents that break banks and spill over a wide area.

In the worst floods on record in 1950 the normally dry Lake Eyre became an inland sea covering 7700 sq km. Then there were the shifting ’sands between Maree and Edwards Creek, south of Coolangatta, that buried the rails up to 1.3 m. Little wonder it took a minimum of two days to

complete the full journey from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Stories of delay are legion. Passengers have been airlifted out in times of severe flooding or forced to wait in the train for days until lines were cleared or repaired. A story is told of a passenger who rushed up to a guard on the Ghan asking .for medical help because his wife was about to have a baby.

“You shouldn’t have brought her on the train in that condition,” said the guard. “She wasn’t expecting when we came aboard,” came the reply. Although it was completed in 1929, construction of the Northern Line was begun at Port Augusta in 1877 by a colony fired by enthusiasm for developing its great tracts of land, which then included the Northern Territory.

Wheat exports to Britain were increasing and farmers in the south were anxious to break new ground further inland. “The rain will follow the plough,” was a popular belief in those times.

In this they were encouraged by unusually good seasons north of the crop survival line drawn by the then Surveyor-Gen-eral, George Woodroofe Goyder. The route of the original rail line through the difficult terrain of the Flinders Ranges was influenced by the wheat farmers, many of whom were later to pay the penalty for ignoring Goyder’s warnings.

Up through the Pichi Richi pass to Quorn, gangs of navvies laboured to build the Port Augusta and Government Gums Railway, as the first section was known, using pick axe and shovel and horse-drawn scrapers. The line reached Government Gums, or Farina,

in 1882 and Hergott Springs in the next year. The section to Odnadatta took a little longer, until 1890.

The bills had started to become painfully long before then. The Port Aug-usta-Hergott Springs line had cost the fledgling colony more than two million pounds — all of it borrowed. Plans to take the line further north were shelved in the face of bad seasons, depression and high unemployment. By 1907 South Australia had agreed to surrender the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth and sell the Great Northern Railway, only to lease it back from the Federal Government soon after. It was returned to full Commonwealth control in 1926 and work started on the final section to Alice Springs in 1927.

Since the Flinders Ranges section has been bypassed by a standardgauge line from Port Augusta to Leigh Creek and Marree, opened in 1957. All that remains of the southern part of the line is a small section from Quorn through Pichi Richi Pass to Woolshed Flat, restored and used by steam train enthusiasts.

The closing of the old Ghan line will leave about 70,000 tonnes of scrap steel worth about $3 million and enough railway sleepers to satisfy an army of landscape gardeners for years. Contracts will be let for demolition of the line, some of which is expected to be recycled by the railway, by owners of the small railways in _ the Queensland cane fields, and by various railway historical societies. There have also been efforts by people at the Alice Springs end of the narrow-gauge line to preserve a section of it. The Ghan name will also live on. It has been adopted as the name for the new service to and from Alice Springs.