Back in Katherine

We are currently on our way to Alice Springs with the Ghan - one of the great old railways in Australia - and we have a three hour stop-over in Katherine. As we already saw the town of Katherine before and there was not much to do except for browsing the windows of shops, we decided to spent some time in an internet cafe again.
The Ghan, by the way, has not always been such a glorious railway. In fact, the final connection from Alice Springs to Darwin was just recently finished, about 100 years behind schedule (for one century it was only possible to travel from Adelaide to Alice Springs - half way of the total planned route). Additionally, the original Ghan was built partly onto a floodplain, so that the tracks were frequently washed away by the floods. Apparently this was not a good base for a regular train service, so the tracks had to be built elsewhere in the seventies again. In the years before, it was not uncommon that train passengers had to be supplied with food and water by parachute drops, as the train was often stranded virtually nowhere in the vast plains of the outback. And even if the tracks remained in place, the service was not too fast, as the Ghan once arrived ,10 days late in Alice Springs. The last of the old Ghan locomotives was finally put out of order in the late seventies, after it collided with a cow. ;)
Well, as far as Katherine, the tracks were in place and we did not hit any cows or other animals, but the pace of the train is a bit slow, as it travels at an average speed of 80km/h. On the other hand it is LONG. It consists of 42 wagons, each about 30m long, which brings the total length to way over 1km. The first sight of it is really impressive.

Here is a picture of the Ghan from some internet source: