RailSA

Every day Graeme Parslow is haunted by four faces. They are the people who were killed in October 2002 when The Ghan train he was driving ploughed into a car and a bus.

The Indian Pacific’s 40th birthday marked a double-whammy in Australia’s rail history.
It was this train that ran Australia’s first east-west rail service on standard gauge, which departed from Sydney’s Central Station on Monday, February 23 1970 and arrived in Perth on Friday, February 27 to 10,000 people.

Heavy rain has washed away part of the rail track between Crystal Brook and Peterborough in South Australia and left other parts covered in mud.

It was the movement some thought would never happen. Train number 2AL8, better known as Great Southern Rail’s ‘The Southern Spirit’, pulled out of Adelaide Parklands Terminal shortly after 8:30AM this morning bound for Alice Springs.

Passengers on board The Ghan, which was forced to return to Darwin after large parts of the train track were flooded, praised the efforts of the train driver yesterday.