Late one evening in February 2004, the first passenger train rolled in to Tennant Creek.

After more than a hundred years of broken promises and false starts, the Ghan service finally made it from Alice Springs to Darwin. A cheerful crowd, most of the town, waited patiently for inaugural service to arrive.

Unfortunately for Tennant Creek it is not included as a regular scheduled stop on the Ghan service and so no platform has been built. On the night of the first train the celebrities had to jump or climb down the metre or so to the ground. Gough Whitlam, for one, decided it was safer to stay aboard.

Alexander Downer, Nick Minchin and Tim Fischer made it to the speakers’ podium, as did South Australia Premier Mike Rann and Clare Martin, Chief Minister of the Northern Territory.

Clare Martin told the story of the 1934 gold shipment, 15kg worth over £4000, sent from the Tennant Creek region to Alice Springs – and never seen again.

Tim Fischer, an unashamed train buff, assured the crowd that, while Tennant Creek may not yet be a ‘Chicago’, it would one day be a great rail hub. Of course the chance of this happening is diminished by the sad lack of earlier inter-state co-operation. If the track was extended east into Queensland to get to the coast the engineers would be confronted at Mount Isa by rails that are 368.3mm closer together!

Nevertheless, the Alice to Darwin railway was an innovative engineering project. The fellow who got the job transporting the rail sections from Whyalla came up with a brilliant design for a rail carrying road train that allowed for 25 metre lengths to be carried by standard 15 metre trailers.

He realised that with few corners along the route to Alice Springs and Tennant Creek he could overlap the rails from one trailer across the top of the one in front. This significantly cut down on the number of welds needed to make the 357 metre lengths taken to the track laying machine each night from the sleeper factory.

The town was invited out to watch the tracklaying on the day it went past Tennant Creek. It was an amazing sight to watch a machine, being fed by a kilometre-long line of sleeper wagons, all being pulled along at slow walking pace by a massive bulldozer.

Nothing but a smooth embankment in front of it – but in its wake, a complete rail line needing only a bit more ballast for stability to be added during the night.

The Adelaide to Darwin railway is not likely to ever carry much of our freight. It’s more efficient to load or unload ships close to the source or the destination of the goods and some people have questioned why the line was built at all.

It does run past the sites on the short list for Australia’s first permanent nuclear waste dump which may just be a coincidence but you never know.

Actually, I think the most appropriate place for nuclear waste storage is under Parliament House in Canberra. It needs constant guarding but it’s absolutely safe, right?