Riding the Ghan: a four-day train journey from Darwin to Adelaide

A four-day train journey through Australia’s heartbrings friendship, insights – and Neil Young.

The Ghan at sunset. Picture: Tourism NT

Something about this locomotive, all this southbound steel, makes me want to scribble deep thoughts in my notebook. “Welfare mothers make better lovers,” said Neil Young, and I can’t confirm that, though my old man could.

One whole chugging kilometre of train on a 3000km track, 43 carriages, our beautiful Ghan, our slender serpent on a four-day ride from Darwin to Adelaide, traversing this mighty continent from top to bottom.

Something about this platinum dining cart with its plush Agatha Christie green velvet trimmings, something about the way this midday sun hangs out my window over Northern Territory termite pyramids and full creeks and red desert bush makes me want to write.

“If you want to pet that old hound dog,” said Neil Young, “make sure he ain’t rolled

in shit.” That is, if you want to traverse Australia, you might want to do it in

The Ghan’s platinum carriage.

One of the Americans, Temp, cracks a light beer. “Did you hear who was staying in your cabin before you?” I ask him.

“Uh huh!” Temp says, eyes alight. “Neil Young!”

Templeton Keller looks and sounds like Sundance Kid-period Robert Redford. For his 40th birthday, Temp asked his parents (renowned children’s education pioneers in their native Chicago), his brother, his sister and their spouses to share the Chairman’s Carriage with him on a once-in-a-lifetime central Australian Ghan rail journey. Temp, who believes rail is the only way to travel, has long been enchanted by this legendary route that began in 1929 out of Adelaide with a train bound for Stuart – now known as Alice Springs – carrying mail, fresh fruit and 100 passengers, one of whom dubbed the train “The Afghan Express” in tribute to the Afghan cameleers who once lugged goods through this daunting and treacherous inland oil painting.

“Neil loves his trains,” Temp says.

Master troubadour Young, of course, was a train enthusiast from childhood. There’s a 230m model train track in his backyard barn. He famously invented a game-changing digital control system that enabled his son, Ben – who has cerebral palsy – to enjoy the chugga-chug hum of the model trains with him.

Young reportedly soaked up every second of his own Ghan journey: the tireless and outgoing staff, the passengers from all corners of Earth and, most of all, the gentle, rhythmic rockabye movement of this glorious machine. Young gets it and I get it, too. I never saw a moving train that I didn’t want to board. So human is its course, arriving and escaping, leaving and returning.

“Train of love,” said Neil Young, “racing from heart to heart.”

It’s five o’clock somewhere and the Brits are clinking glasses of good champagne and asking for another bowl of barbecue crisps.

My wife and I are among a dozen passengers spread through the dining cart, the platinum carriage couples living it up in five-star bottomless gin and tonic bliss. We dine on beef cheeks and lamb cutlets and wild-peach parfait and menu items that change with the scenery, from Northern Territory beef medallions to Nullarbor Plain kangaroo loin to Barossa Valley chorizo.

The train is a series of opening doors, each leading to new and wondrous places. The door that opens to the cook’s kitchen; the door that opens to the Gold Class dining hall – like walking into a 1920s speakeasy; the door that opens to your personal cabin, with its full-size ensuite, in-cabin music channels and a large rectangular window rolling a 24-hour, vivid-colour show of Australian landscapes you could never see by road or air.

“Is it always this green?” asks a Canadian businessman, looking out his window to a landscape that has come alive with summer rains. Purple dwarf plants cover red plains that stretch to a flatline horizon. Endless fields of arid-land acacias with bright yellow seed pods so plentiful it feels like the sky just snowed honeycomb. And suddenly I’m an expert on inland Australian waterways. “I’ve never seen it look so beautiful,” I say.

It might just be a shiraz buzz but I’m so deeply proud of my country right now, this place I seldom see so clearly, all its magnificence dawning on me through a reflection in the wide eyes of foreigners.

We read novels, spot kangaroos and play long and chatty rounds of Scrabble. Ol’ Blue Eyes sings through our cabin speakers. There’s no joy quite like watching the love of one’s life – a working mother-of-two whose idea of a getaway is a hot bath and a Who mag – landing “toenails” on a triple word score while crossing the border between the Northern Territory and South Australia.

The train becomes so heavenly, so not real, that it almost hurts to disembark at designated stops and exit into the static reality of a concrete platform. But what waits beyond each platform has its own wonder. We make day trips through majestic Katherine Gorge, winding through 13 gorges carved from the ancient sandstone of Nitmiluk National Park, filled with Aboriginal art and native wildlife. In Alice Springs we skirt the soaring MacDonnell Ranges on camels, like those Afghan cameleers did 150 years before us. In the alien moonscape opal town of Coober Pedy – the latest addition to the Ghan’s excursion schedule – we explore labyrinthine mines, hold sparkling million-dollar opals in our hands and watch the sun go down over The Breakaways, mystical flat-topped mesas exploding from a painted desert of stony gibber, formed from what was a vast inland sea 70 million years ago to create a scene that rivals Arizona’s Monument Valley and maybe even our dear old Uluru.

But I’m yet to find a rock that matches the wonder of ordinary people. It’s the best thing about The Ghan, the passengers, the staff, the random souls who blow aboard. Like the train’s service manager, Jos Engelaar, a lively Dutchman with a moustache the size and shape of Uluru. Like our tireless personal concierges on the platinum carriage, Amanda and Gloria. Like Temp and the Keller family from America, who can’t stop praising Australia’s great attributes: our landscape, our friendliness and the thunderous recordings of AC/DC.

Like Duncan and Joyce from Scotland. “We’ve been to Adelaide several times for the grand prix,” says Duncan.

“Really!”

“Our son is a Formula One driver.”

“Really! What’s his name?”

“David Coulthard.”

And over a dinner of damper, kangaroo meat and red wine, Duncan and Joyce tell the hypnotic tale of how they went flat broke taking their gifted son from budding go-kart driver to Ayrton Senna’s friend and protégé to Formula One great. In the morning, Duncan Coulthard asks if he can borrow a razor and I offer him mine and he’s so grateful he tells me the story of how he came to be close friends with Brian Johnson, the lead singer of AC/DC. It seems positively natural, then, after such shared goodwill, that at 2am we are all drinking Scotch whisky at the Keller family’s private dining table in the Chairman’s Carriage, once occupied by train nut Neil Young, as The Ghan chugs through the black deserts of South Australia to the sound of Highway to Hell.

Temp raises a glass and makes a toast to his beloved Australia. I return the gesture, making a seven-minute toast to the American War of Independence, the iPhone and Johnny Depp. Then we all stand and make a toast to The Ghan, our great adventurer, our slender serpent.

“Earth is a flower and it’s pollinating,” Neil Young said. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Neil Young said. “Trains are a lot of fun,” Neil Young said.

Ghan Expedition platinum service $4299 per person, gold service $3199 per person

greatsouthernrail.com.au