With the new rail link between Alice Springs and Darwin reaching the halfway mark recently, Australia's Legendary Ghan is one step closer to running. Eric Russell reports.

Australia's Legendary Ghan is a train that features in many tales of the country's colourful early days. It ran through the Northern Territory and it seems that both drivers and passengers had to be as hard as the countryside.
Passengers that will use the line in the future have it very soft in comparison. Journey time over the 70mph line will be 47 hours using diesel traction, whereas, in the past, some trains had taken two months on the trip.
The new 1420km line will complete Australia's national rail network by connecting Darwin with the south of the country and creating a bridge to Asia and the rest of the world through Darwin's East Arm Port, which includes an intermodal container terminal.
Construction work started in June 2001 and the line is expected to open in 2004. The South Australian and Northern Territory governments established the AustralAsia Railway Corporation to coordinate and oversee the delivery of the project, which is being built by ADrail, a joint venture between Halliburton KBR, Barclay Mowlem, John Holland and Macmahon, at a cost of AUS$1.3billion.
The project is being managed as a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer Back (BOOT) scheme with lease arrangements covering 50 years' operation before the railway is handed back to the Northern Territory and South Australian Governments. It is expected that freight customers will be the main users and the cargo target is three million tonnes a year.

Logistics

The new rail line will require a massive logistical exercise to overcome the difficulties of building a new railway across some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. With summer temperatures reaching 50¼C in the shade and a three-month monsoon season, the work has to be planned very carefully.
Two construction depots have been set up: at Katherine, 1100km from Alice Springs, and Tennant Creek, and construction teams will work towards each other meeting up around the 800km mark. The teams will then work north from Katherine to Darwin and south from Tennant Creek to Alice Springs.
This method has been chosen to minimise the distances work trains have to travel to the head of steel every day and to accommodate the impact of the summer rainy season in the tropical north.

Each team will lay 1.8 to 2km of track a day using around 2500t of material. At its furthest point the work site will be 300km from the loading point, meaning the teams will have to move the 2500t of material 300km each day before work can start. The railway requires 15 million cubic metres of earthworks in total.
Continuous welded rail will be used throughout. But if it was not properly restrained and pre-stressed, the excessive heat of the region would expand the steel rails at up to 200m/hr and they would eventually extend 1.1km out to sea at Darwin.
Water supply for the project is crucial for earthworks compaction, dust suppression and camp water. Because the railway route traverses some of the most arid parts of Australia, groundwater development is playing a major role in the project.
The groundwater supply initiatives for the project have had a very long gestation. In the early 1980s significant groundwater development work was undertaken to establish railway water supply bores in some sections, particularly in the Tertiary age Ti Tree Basin. Subsequent groundwater development work was undertaken as part of the compensation scheme for some landowners affected by the construction of the railway.

Track construction

Tracklaying will be an end-on construction technique with materials being transported over newly laid track to the head of steel each day. Behind the sleeper and rail train, a ballast rake with remote-controlled doors will drop ballast over the skeleton track.
A tamper will then lift the track 100mm through the ballast and vibrate and squeeze ballast under the sleepers. Next will come a second ballast drop followed by a 50mm lift. A ballast regulator will then distribute the ballast evenly, and a final tamping run will complete the operation.
Tracklaying will be done by a Plasser & Theurer, Austria, SUM1000 tracklayer operating on the northern half of the line from the 800km mark to Darwin, and a Harsco, United States, Model NTC New Track Construction machine manufactured in Brisbane, operating on the southern half from the 800km mark to Alice Springs.
The business end of the Plasser machine has an operating speed of 300m to 500m/h with a capacity of eight to 10 sleepers per minute. Its travelling speed on-track is 50km/h.
In total, two million sleepers and eight million rail clips will be required. The project will consume 195 tonnes of cement and fly ash and 900tonnes of aggregate and sand each day.
The line will be built for 23-tonne axleloads with clearances for double-stack containers, and maximum train speeds of 115km/h. Maximum gradient will be 0.8 per cent. There will be 100 bridges with an aggregate length of 4km, and about 1000 culverts. At the peak, 1250 people will be involved in construction.

Design software

The design team at ADrail is using a local software to design the new line. MX has been developed by Melbourne-based Infrasoft, now owned by Bentley Systems. It has been used right from the preliminary design and route studies for the line.
The software has helped sort out problems such as curve radii where there was insufficient land to accommodate curves that would allow the rain to travel at full speed. Although the minimum curve radius had to be 1200m to accommodate the maximum train length of 2100m, two sections had to be designated as low speed where the curve radius had to be reduced to 900m.
MX will also be used for the detail design of the sidings and yards associated with the line.
MX is a powerful suite of 3D civil engineering design tools, used daily by thousands of rail and road designers in 70 countries. It allows users to input existing data from a variety of sources such as mapping, ground, aerial and satellite survey. It can run within AutoCAD making the production of drawings from CAD data quick and easy.
Stephen Bradford, CEO for train operator Great Southern Railway, says interest in the train has been heavy for some time so the company has set up the Ghan Top End Club, a free club that gives priority access to tickets. Members can purchase tickets for the train one week before they are released to the general public. More than 8500 travellers have already joined. A fitting tribute to an exceptional venture.

The Legendary Ghan

John Borthwick, one of Australia's leading travel writers, says the Legendary Ghan runs across the flattest, oldest, driest, hottest, dustiest and most deserted bit of earth on Earth
Common knowledge says 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 settlers. The arrival in the 1920s of the railway spelled the demise of the camel but the train that displaced the Afghans became known as The Ghan.
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 the train became 'The Ghan'.

In 1980 Australian National Railways closed the original, flood-prone line 300km 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, 1555km 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.
The legendary train that has passed into Australian folk law really only came into existence on 4 August 1929 when the first passengers arrived at Stuart, yet to be named Alice Springs. It was two and a half hours late. Whether the train was named after the Afghan camel drivers or was a private staff joke at the expense of Commonwealth Railways Commissioner George Gahan, probably no one will ever know.
Commissioner Gahan was on that first train back in 1929 and had been personally involved, when as CR Chief Engineer the line extension proposals were being formalised and construction of new luxury passenger rolling stock was undertaken.
Today, the legendary Ghan promises to be a huge tourist attraction as well as adding significantly to Australia's trading wealth.