It is hard to imagine the social and industrial change ushered in by the 19th century 'Golden Era of Steam'.

Trains replaced uncomfortable, expensive and time-consuming trips by camel, horse and bullock wagon, stage coach, ship and even dog sled, allowing people to travel for pleasure and live away from their work for the first time. Trains carried the mail, fish to London, cattle to port and troops to war. Trains even led to standardised time! In England, time between towns could vary by up to 14 minutes. The new telegraph network, usually located at train stations, allowed English towns to keep to 'train time', while the first trains from Darwin to Pine Creek ran to Overland Telegraph time.

Trains were built in the 14th century to cart material from European mines and connect mines with quays. They were drawn by horses or people (including women and children).

The first public goods train was the Surrey Iron Railway Co, a horse-drawn service which opened in 1803 and ran between Croydon and Wordsworth for 51 years. The first fare-paying passenger line was the Oystermouth Railway in Wales, worked by horses and opened in 1806. It was later called the Swansea and Mumbles Railway, converted to steam then electricity, and closed only in 1960.

However, it was the Industrial Revolution that brought railways into their own. Iron and steel were plentiful, and railways were built using cast iron rails and flanged iron wheels.

The first steam engine, George Stephenson's famous Locomotion, was little more than a boiler on four wheels. It was built in 1825 for £500 and operated on the Stockton to Darlington line in the north of England. It was replaced by the Rocket in 1829.

Within decades railways had spread across the world and English factories and foundries were turning out rail and rolling stock for export.

The first rail journey in Australia was an 11-kilometre horse-drawn tram between Goolwa and Port Elliott in South Australia, which opened in 1854. In the same year the first steam train ran three kilometres from Melbourne to Port Melbourne, followed shortly afterwards by a 23-kilometre line from Sydney to Parramatta. South Australia opened a 13-kilometre line to Adelaide in 1856 and by 1860 had a line to the Kapunda copper mine.

In 1855, the first NSW Railway Governor spoke of the time "when the whole country would be covered with a network of railways... to help develop the resources of the country and increase the value of the vast Territory now lying waste." By 1861 there were 390 kilometres of line in Australia, by 1871 there were 1657 kilometres, and by 1881 there were 6456 kilometres in six colonies.

In countries such as Canada and America, railway lines ran from coast to coast, linked isolated towns, fostered settlement, and were regarded as instruments of nation-building. In Australia, however, 'railway mania' was parochial and uncoordinated. Rather than linking isolated towns and seaboards, railway lines were built to link ports with local hinterlands, not city with city. Each colony jealously developed autonomous economies and railway systems, with different gauges and little thought of transcontinental travel. It was to be another 100 years before gauges on the national rail network were standardised.

Gradually, the era of steam passed. Although the ready availability of coal meant steam engines lasted for over 100 years, they were regarded as dirty, inefficient in their use of fuel, and the need for water boilers created supply problems. In the 1950s, steam was replaced by diesel.

These days, electric trains have become common, especially for services in built-up areas. But around the world, people still love their steam engines and museums such as the Ghan Preservation Society in Alice Springs have lovingly restored old trains as tourist attractions.

The Northern Territory's first engine, the Sandfly, a Baldwin shunter built in Philadelphia in 1886, worked in Darwin for 60 years. The restored shunter is now on the Keswick station platform in Adelaide where passengers embark on the Ghan passenger service for Alice Springs.

Early Northern Territory Transport

When Australia's remote inland was settled, there were no trains to carry passengers and freight. Early explorers battled across the continent by foot, horseback or camel, many dying of thirst and starvation. The first settlers in Port Darwin faced an uncomfortable 5025 mile trip by steamer, running the gauntlet of reefs and storms off the Queensland and Victorian coasts.

Once they reached Port Darwin, adventurers and miners alike struggled inland on foot. Those with a little money could take a boat to the other side of the harbour to meet Haimes' Royal Mail Coach, which left Southport at 6 am on Sundays. However, the cost of taking freight across to the Southport jetty was twice the cost of bringing it from Adelaide and bullock wagons to the Pine Creek gold fields could take weeks in the Wet season. The flood of mostly Chinese miners arriving on the Territory gold fields in the 1870s couldn't afford the fares and generally carried provisions on their backs.

One of the Territory's first settlers, Harriet Daly, arrived in 1870 with her father, Bloomfield Douglas, the first Government Resident in Darwin. She paints a vivid picture of early Palmerston, as Darwin was then called.

After a three-month voyage on the Gulnare, their furniture following in a barque, the Douglas family was eagerly greeted by earlier settlers hungry for Adelaide gossip. They waited another three months for a ship to bring letters, books and supplies. Mrs Daly talks of the family sitting up all night to read 'sacks' of newspapers after a later shipment: "Can it be credited that the whole Franco-Prussian War had been fought, and the deadly struggle over, before we had even heard of there being a prospect of war?" she exclaims.

In 1872 the Overland Telegraph line was built between Darwin and Adelaide, connecting Australia with the rest of the world. This provided a major boost for farmers who, for the first time, could check daily wool and wheat prices on the London market instead of waiting months for the mail and European papers.

Building the line meant 15,000 telegraph poles across the continent. But first the telegraph teams had to land! Mrs Daly describes their arrival:

'All the cargo had to be unloaded, and this was no easy matter, for there was no jetty, even of the rudest description, at which a boat, let alone a ship, could lie. The horses were landed first - hoisted in slings and lowered over the ship's side, and when once in the water, they were released and swam to land. Drays were floated ashore, their wheels following them in a boat, and a large telegraph camp was formed on the tableland overhead.'

The telegraph teams then had to push inland in country described by Mrs Daly as:

'... destitute, not only of any road, but absolutely devoid of any cleared track. As the line was surveyed - a sufficient length being first chained by a surveyor, who was followed by axemen - trees had to be felled and a certain width maintained, which was specified in the contract, for drays to follow... Everything for the use of the construction party had to be taken on the drays, for they were going into an absolutely desolate country, containing nothing that would sustain human life except the yams used by the natives. '

During the Wet, travel became impossible, with horses having to pull drays "through a perfect quagmire of mud"

The story was similar for those travelling into the interior. Dorris Blackwell, whose father Thomas Bradshaw was one of the first telegraph masters in Alice Springs, talks of her first trip in 1899:

'After reaching Terowie, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Adelaide, we were put aboard the narrow-gauge 'Ghan and remained in the same reserved carriage until Oodnadatta, where we arrived three days later... Even to a girl, there seemed to be something about a steam engine which is missing from the diesel and electric trains we have today...

'It hissed and snarled, grunted and whistled, and smoked like some monstrous human being. We came to regard ours as a friend almost as much as we did the driver and the firemen. These men, in their blue overalls with big sweat rags of cotton waste, were friends indeed. They made the trip a joy for us all. When we wanted a cup of tea, for instance, we simply took a teapot along to the driver at one of the frequent stopping places. He pressed a button and, presto! We had a potful of boiling water. Nor were they ever in a hurry; they didn't mind stopping for a yarn with passers-by, or waiting patiently for passengers who wandered off. If some were more than usually slow in returning to the train the driver would blow his whistle peremptorily, but never did he threaten to leave anyone behind. He knew none were travelling north for pleasure.'

From Oodnadatta, the family had a 300 mile trip to Alice Springs, which took 18 days of following the line of telegraph poles by horse-drawn buggy and buckboard. There was no protection from the weather as they travelled through gibber and sand, on iron-tyred wood wheels, cooking utensils and water bags hanging from the buckboard. Five horses were needed, with another 30 in reserve, but many had to be abandoned after the strenuous trip.

Once the family had arrived in Alice Springs, their only contact with the outside world was by telegraph, with medical consultations conducted in Morse code. Supplies arrived once a year with strings of camels, which had been brought to Australia for the Burke and Wills expedition, and their Afghan riders.

The cost of bringing building materials to Alice Springs was prohibitive, most early graziers living in primitive camps without their families. In 1929, when Alice Springs' 200 residents gathered to meet the first Ghan, which arrived over five hours late after boiler problems at Oodnadatta, the Northern Territory Times and Gazette predicted "striking developments in the pastoral and mining industries as a result of the line which should do much to make life in Central Australia more comfortable and less costly".

Start of the Transcontinental Line

The first suggestion of a transcontinental line between Adelaide and the tropical north came from a Melbourne businessman, J. Roberston in 1858. This was four years before land speculators financed John McDouall Stuart's trip across the continent; five years before South Australia took control of the Northern Territory; and eight years before the settlement of Escape Cliffs (which moved to Palmerston in 1869). Not surprisingly, the South Australian Government rejected the offer.

However, the benefits of a transcontinental railway were a constant theme of South Australian Parliamentary debate for the next four decades.

The 19th century was Australia's pioneering era, with gold seekers, adventurers and pastoralists seeking new land and fortunes. In South Australia, farmers moved north across Goyder's 'drought line' in an attempt to find more arable land, good seasons giving them confidence in the quaint belief that 'the rain follows the plough'.

Railways were needed to bring wheat and mining produce to Port Augusta and Adelaide, but these early lines were seen as the start of a transcontinental line that would foster the development of mining, tropical agriculture and trade with Asia.

The problem for the small colony was how to pay for the lines. Canada's 3000 mile transcontinental railway was built by a Montreal syndicate and funded by granting large tracts of land to the developers. But South Australians were suspicious of overseas interests and determined to build their own railways, with loans from London, confident that the lines would quickly pay their way.

In the meantime, however, South Australia was more concerned with building the Overland Telegraph line through Stuart's newly surveyed country. Not only was this the largest infrastructure development in Australia of its era, but the role played by Darwin when the cable arrived from Java in 1872 symbolised the Top End's strategic importance to Australia.

By the time the telegraph line was completed, its costs had quadrupled and the South Australian Government was broke. A vote to build a railway line by land grant was narrowly defeated in 1872. In 1876, a Bill authorised a railway line from Port Augusta to Government Gums (later Farina), saying:

'Trains carrying goods, or goods and passengers, shall not travel at a greater rate of speed than 14 miles an hour; and trains carrying passengers only shall not travel at a greater rate of speed than 20 miles an hour.'

The £578,944 construction contract, the largest of its kind in Australia, was awarded to a South Australian firm, Barry Brookes and Fraser. The first sod was turned by Governor Sir William Jervois in January 1878 - two months after the first work gangs had actually left Port Augusta. As the newspapers of the time reported:

'He believed it was Trollope who said that this railway was to go through a desert to nowhere. But he ventured to say that it did not go through a desert and that it went everywhere. If it only went to Port Darwin it would be worth constructing. But in going there it went to Java, India, Siam, China, and also shortened the communications with Europe and America. The line would ramify eventually to Queensland and New South Wales, and who could tell the full benefits which would accrue from connecting all these colonies with the iron band of a railway.'

This Southern Line reached Oodnadatta in 1891, which remained the railhead until the line was extended to Alice Springs in 1929.

As late as the 1970s, Territorians have fond memories of the old Ghan crossing bad sections of the track at walking pace, or being held up for days at Flood-prone Finke. Former Territory policeman Tony Kelly recently recounted working at Finke in the 1950s for Citation, a magazine published by the NT Police Historical Society:

'The main events of the week were the arrival of the Ghan, which stopped at the Finke to fill the depleted water tanks of the steam engine, and to refresh the passengers at the pub. When ready to leave, the train would blow its whistle to empty the hotel. Sometimes it would have to start up and move the carriages to convince the drinkers to leave. It was a hectic half - hour but never any trouble as the customers concentrated on drinking. The Ghan was not air conditioned - I don't think anything was - and at that time it did not have a Bar.'

In 1980, a new standard gauge line opened from Tarcoola to Alice Springs along a less flood-prone route.

The Northern Line

In 1883, the John Cox Bray Government introduced the Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway Bill. The £959,300 contract went to C & E Millar of Melbourne, while Mr Wishart won the £51,600 contract to build a jetty. The Millars proved efficient contractors and the Krupps lines and the bridges they built were still in use 80 years later.

In the north, unemployed miners from the Kimberleys, then thousands of Chinese and Indians did most of the back-breaking work. The Chinese for many years outnumbered the few Europeans living in the Northern Territory and, as miners, merchants and service providers, were essential to the Territory's early development.

As the railway grew, it replaced Charles Haimes' weekly passenger and mail coach from Southport (a town at the bottom of what is now Middle Arm). Southport closed but Rum Jungle, Adelaide River, Brock's Creek, and Burrundie grew.

The northern line was built primarily to take freight. But after opening on 30 September, 1888, it rarely ran at a profit. The gold rush died, cattle were not proving successful and were too far from the line, the Wet season caused derailments as embankments washed away, termites ate the wooden sleepers, and the Territory's population was in decline.

By 1891, South Australia had spent 10 million on railways, the colony's bonded debt was 21.5 million pounds, two million of which was incurred in the Territory, and the completion of the northern line coincided with growing disillusionment with its northern colony. In 1911, the Commonwealth took over the administration of the Territory.

Damage caused by a cyclone in 1897 took two years to repair. Meanwhile, the Government was faced with the cost of replacing the jetty, which was suffering from the effects of toredo bore worms and the weather.

As part of the new administration the first Superintendent of Railways and Harbour Master, H V Francis, was appointed by the Government Resident Gilruth in 1912. Francis' responsibilities included the Government owned steamer fleet, collecting lighthouse dues from visiting ships, maintenance of the Government's electric light and refrigeration plants, and care of the Resident's car.

Darwin was hardly a thriving tourist destination, but when steamers called, special trains met them at Port Darwin and took passengers to the Botanic Gardens, the town's sole tourist attraction, for a fare of two shillings.

By now, the total non-Aboriginal population was still only 3310 (1418 European, 1331 Chinese, 280 Aborigines of mixed race and 281 'others'). Poor economic conditions continued to plague the railway, with the failure of crops at Batchelor and the short-lived Vestey's Meatworks between 1914 and 1920, which at its peak used three trains a day and employed 460 men in Darwin.

At the end of the First World War work began on extending the line to Emungalen, on the banks of the Katherine River, so Vestey's could get cattle to the Darwin meatworks. The last section of this line pioneered the use of tractors and early model earth-moving equipment. The pressed steel sleepers were the first of their type made in Australia.

Labour was short, so Greeks, White Russians, and Patagonians were brought to Australia. A full-time doctor was appointed, the beginning of a Government medical service.

Local police soon came to know some of the 'wilder' elements of the railway gangs in Katherine. In one novel crime, thieves built a spur track into the bush, removed the goods in two vans, set the vans alight and covered their tracks by removing the rails.

Many of the workers settled in the Territory, lasting longer than Vestey's which closed in 1920, leaving the Government to meet the £500,000 cost of upgrading the line.

Despite this setback, a £94,000 bridge was finally built across the Katherine River, largely to relieve unemployment. The 213 metre bridge was based on the design of a bridge in Penrith, NSW. It consisted of seven 100-foot spans and was supported by reinforced concrete piers founded on cast-iron cylinders filled with concrete and resting on solid bedrock. Stone came from a new quarry at Edith River. It took a year to build and was used during floods for all traffic until a new high level bridge was built in 1976.

The first train crossed in 1926, Emungalen closed, and the town of Katherine grew on the new site across the river. The line was meant to continue on to Daly Waters, but when funds ran out in the Depression, it terminated at Birdum, 509 kilometres from Darwin. There was nothing at Birdum - except a buffer to indicate the end of the line.

The inefficiencies of rail at the time and the lack of a sealed road made Darwin dependent on shipping - until the Second World War when shipping became unsafe and troops moving to the north had a long and uncomfortable trip by land.

Darwin became a strategic defence post after 220 Darwin people were killed in the only major Japanese bombing raid on an Australian city. At the peak of defence activity in the north, there were 120,000 troops and, since shipping was no longer safe, the railway became essential for supplies. Unfortunately, the rail and rolling stock had run down and the first troops arrived in converted cattle trucks, dubbing their northward ride the 'Spirit of Protest'. A unique carriage was made for short trips by placing a Leyland truck chassis on rail wheels. The contraption looked odd, but necessity was the mother of a useful invention!

The need to move troops and supplies led to suggestions of closing the 1000 kilometre gap between Birdum, where the northern line had reached in 1929, and Alice Springs. In the end, the Stuart Highway was sealed between Alice Springs and Darwin, leaving the legacy of a major infrastructure project to the Territory.

Hundreds of volunteer firemen and train drivers came to work in the Territory during the war as Darwin's rolling stock received a massive boost. Not only did they work long hours in trying conditions, but considerable ingenuity was required in restoring damaged lines as there were no cranes or breakdown carriages. Because they lacked continuous brakes, the trains were difficult to control and there were many derailments.

After the war, the railway had mixed fortunes. Despite the introduction of diesel hydraulic rail cars with air-conditioning and reclining seats, the line was not well patronised and deteriorated. There was a boost in the 1960s with the opening of the Frances Creek iron ore mine, which closed in 1976 - the victim of damage from Cyclone Tracy in 1974, a crash caused by an out-of-control ore train in 1972, and declining iron ore sales.

Darwin people were upset at the loss of their line. As Harvey says in his book, The Never Never Line:

'Profit-making had never been a high priority with the Never Never Line. Service had been its prime motivation over the years - not the blue ribbon service which panders to the upper circle but practical, down-to-earth, pioneering service proffered cheerfully within the limits of meagre resources. Its trains had run whenever asked, despite enemy bombs, cyclones, floods, economic depressions and recessions, government and public indifference, and the inexorable delay caused by the tropical environment.'

National Australia Rail became a freight agency for road trains and redundant staff were given priority for other jobs in the public service, including work as prison guards.

The rails were disposed of, at $50 a tonne, to Queensland, and as reinforcing rods to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines. Sleepers were donated to Indonesia under the Colombo Plan. Wagons went to Port Augusta in South Australia. The old Larrimah school for the children of railway workers was moved to Berry Springs.

Completing the Trade Link

'Port Darwin is one of the finest harbours in Australia... So sure as to-morrow follows to-day this magnificent harbour will be the Singapore of Australia, provided, of course, certain works are under-taken and restrictions removed. The work I refer principally to is the trans-contintental line, an undertaking which is bound to be carried out in time, and which will connect the two splendid ports of Augusta and Darwin.'

As these comments from Sub-Collector of Customs, Alfred Searcy show, the vision of a railway linking with Darwin's deep natural port is hardly new. Searcy's comments were made in 1909, reflecting on his time in Darwin in the 1890s. They might just as well have been made in the 1990s!

Darwin has long looked to its north, beginning with visits by the Macassans to fish for trepang and trade with the Yolngu people of Arnhemland. The first British settlements in the north, at Fort Dundas (on Melville Island from 1824 to 1829), Fort Wellington (Raffles Bay from 1827 to 1829) and Port Essington (1838 to 1849) were established for both defence and trade.

When the Overland Telegraph was completed it 1872, it was Darwin where the cables carrying messages from across the world came on shore. In 1934 Imperial Airways, in conjunction with Qantas, began a regular mail and passenger service from London to Sydney, via Darwin.

Yet it is the dream of a transcontinental railway that has engaged South Australians and Territorians for 140 years.

The first promise to complete the line formed part of the 1910 Acceptance Act, when Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and South Australian Premier Tom Price agreed on the terms for the transfer of South Australia: that the Commonwealth would take over the State's £3 million debt, it would acquire the Port Augusta to Oodnadatta Railway, and it would complete a transcontinental line. In 1961, the South Australian Government took the Commonwealth to court to have the line completed - but the court ruled that no date was given in the 1910 Act, therefore the undertaking had not yet been breached!

In 1949, after a line was suggested from Townsville, the Commonwealth agreed to link Birdum with Alice Springs under the Railways Standardisation Agreement Act, which planned for the conversion of South Australia's narrow and broad gauge lines to standard gauge.

In 1977 the Bureau of Transport Economics investigated the potential of the north-south line and recommended instead that the highway be upgraded. A new standard gauge line, along a less flood-prone route, was completed between Tarcoola and Alice Springs in 1980 and the Commonwealth Government pledged $10 million for preliminary work and design for the last section to Darwin.

In 1980, Chief Minister Paul Everingham complained bitterly of the 'missing link':

'We see it as the greatest single need in the evolution of the Northern Territory. We see it as fundamental to the continued growth and development of the Northern Territory and to a great extent to continued progress of Australia as a whole.'

The Northern Territory Government developed a "National Act of Faith" slogan, gave a 1988 deadline, and even held a name the train competition.

In 1983, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser announced that the rail would be built by 1988. Chief Minister Paul Everingham sent him a crate of champagne, prematurely as it turned out, as Fraser lost the 1983 election and the new Hawke Government said the size of the deficit ruled out a railway. David Hill, then Chief Executive of NSW Rail, conducted a study on the costs and benefits of completing the line by 1992. He concluded:

'Even by adopting an optimistic view of the future growth in the Northern Territory, the Inquiry found that investment in the railway between Alice Springs and Darwin cannot be justified and would constitute a major misallocation of the nation's resources.'

In 1994 the Wran (Committee on Darwin) report determined that the railway would be viable by the turn of the century. A Northern Territory Department of Transport and Works study found that the Wran committee had underestimated the freight likely to be carried and subsequent reports commissioned by the Northern Territory Government, including one by the Canadian Pacific Railway consultancy, have supported the viability of the project.

Since Self-government in 1978, the Territory has been visionary and proactive in determining its place in the region. In fact, much of the transformation began four years earlier, after Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974. Territorians bounced back and, since 1974, Darwin's population has grown from 40,000 to 100,000 and new towns, such as Jabiru, have appeared on the map. The Government has sealed the Stuart Highway, provided good infrastructure for the road train industry, built new airports in Darwin, Alice Springs and Yulara, and boosted tourism by sealing the road to Yulara. The Alice Springs to Darwin gas pipeline has been built and communications upgraded.

Just as significantly, the Northern Territory has pioneered the establishment of good relationships with our neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region and was the first overseas Government to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Indonesia, followed by several other regional agreements. In 1995, the Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with South Australia, a partnership providing the basis for the joint South Australia/Northern Territory approach to making the AustralAsia railway a reality.

In 1997 the AustralAsia Railway Corporation was established by the South Australian and Northern Territory governments and tenders were called to build the railway as a BOOT operation: which stands for Built Own Operate and Transfer back. This is part of a growing trend in Australia to private construction and building of railways, which are recognised as an important part of a competitive transport industry.

In June 1999, it was announced that the Asia Pacific Transport Consortium had been selected as the preferred bidder to build and operate the railway. In October, 2000, the first of the 300 project documents were signed, followed by financial close in April 2001. Prime Minister John Howard, South Australian Premier John Olsen and Northern Territory Chief Minister Denis Burke turned the first sod for the project at a ceremony in Alice Springs in July 2001.

Bibliography

Written by Jane Munday, former Marketing and Communications Manager for the Northern Territory Railway Executive Group.

Major sources include:
Bannister, L. 1996. The North-South Transcontinental Railway. Paper prepared by the Railway Executive Group.
Blackwell, D. & Lockwood, D. 1965. Alice on the Line. Landsdowne.
Blainey, G. 1966. The Tyranny of Distance. Sun. Melbourne.
Bonn, D. 1997. The Ghan and the Alice: Australia's Great Train Romance. Tanami Press.
Bromby, R. 1992. Rails to the Top End. Outback Books.
Daly, H. 1887. Digging, Squatting and Pioneering Life in the NT of SA. Sampson, Low, Maston, Searle & Riverington. London.
Forrest, P. 2000. Darwin's waterfront: how ports were born. Northern Territory News. 11 January.
Fuller, B. 1975. The Ghan: The Story of the Alice Springs Railway. Lansdowne. Sydney.
Harvey. J. Y. 1987. The Never-Never Line. Hyland House. Melbourne.
Kelly. T. 2000. The Finke River Police Station. Citation. Vol. 6, No 2. April
Northern Territory Times and Gazette, including the editions of 25 August 1883, 25 August 1883, 21 September 1889, 1 October 1889, 11 October 1889, 4 October 1889, 13 December 1889, and 3 January 1890.
Robbins, M. 1962. The Railway Age. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London.
Searcy, A. 1909. In Australian Tropics. George Robertson & Co. London.
South Australian Parliamentary Debates of 10 October 1879 (1384-1390), 16 August 1883 (816-826), 21 August (850-858), and 31 July 1995 (736-744)
Stevenson, I. R. 1979. The Line That Led to Nowhere: The Story of the North Australian Railway. Rigby.
Stevenson, I. R. 1987. Down the Track. NT Department of Education.