"Wake up! We're stopping in five minutes."

I've been dreaming that I'd wandered into a music studio. Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chug-a-lug-chung. The beat is hypnotically even, never pausing. They hand me some drumsticks and I begin to pound. Bang, bang, bang. But it's all wrong.

"Wake UP!"

I realise with a jolt that my berth is actually in the music studio, vibrating to the beat. And the drummer on my door is The Ghan's guard, getting more frantic by the second.

Luckily I've slept the few hours since bedtime in my clothes, expecting this could happen. I am part of a group disembarking at Manguri Siding. It is a moonless 3am and I can almost feel the tension of the driver watching out for the fires lit by the people who are to meet us. They have come from Coober Pedy, my ultimate destination, half an hour away by road. Visible from kilometres away across the hummocks of  saltbush and spinifex, the fires are beacons to signal when this might train should begin to slow down.

You'd be excused for thinking that The Ghan is too sedate a train to endure such hiccups in the timetable. But the truth is, over its long history, it has faced everything from fire and flash floods to tracks collapsing due to termite activity. One deluge - or so the outback story goes - stranded the train and its crew and passengers for a fortnight, forcing the multi-skilled driver to dig out a rifle and shoot wild goats to augment food supplies.

A glance into the Gold Kangaroo carriages (the top of the three classes available) rich with wood panelling and etched glass, raised visions for me of great aunt Lizzie, maybe, or a duchess travelling in style. Our meal in the Queen Adelaide Restaurant car was appropriately silver service too, and my cabin, although modern enough to keep any 21st century traveller more than content, had a certain turn of the century (and I don't mean THIS century) aura of elegance about it.

A trip on The Ghan is acknowledged as one of the great train journeys of the world. The train's emblem, of course, is an Afghan mounted on a camel, tribute to the redoubtable cameleers who, with their plodding beasts somehow found a way across the red heart of this country.

The Old Ghan route, used until 1982, is now marked as a dotted red line on the map. Today's termite-proof steel track parts company with the old one at Port Augusta (300 kilometres north of Adelaide) the extinct line looping far east before finally reconnecting at Alice Springs, 1555 kilometres from its commencement.

Over 80 years ago, in August, 1929, a hundred passengers boarded the steam-hauled Afghan Express on its two-day inaugural trip to the town of Stuart. Times change, and so do names. Stuart is now Alice Springs, and it's not hard to see how the Ghan came by its current name.

But in February, 2004, The Ghan began a new chapter in its colourful history. The extended Ghan service to Darwin, 1400 kilometres beyond Alice Springs, was the much awaited final leg spanning the continent and created much interest.

It would be more dramatic to say that our train overshot the waiting group trackside, and that we then had to trek back across the inky wilderness, stumbling, and dragging our city-style roll-along baggage.

We didn't of course. We simply lowered ourselves from the carriage to the stony track - no railway platform, just one giant step from the foot plate - then watched as The Ghan gave a genteel farewell huff, hissed and shivered in the cold desert air, then eased its fifteen carriages away from us.

We watched until it was just a shadow on the horizon. In around seven hours it would be in Alice Springs. I imagined the passengers stretching, answering a gentle knock on their doors at 7am, with the offer of tea or coffee. As they breakfasted, the train would be pounding along at its average 85 kilometres an hour. By 10am, just nineteen hours after boarding, they would be in Alice, some taking advantage of add-on package tours to Uluru.

Paul Theroux in his book, The Great Railway Bazaar, writes: "I have seldom heard a train go by, and not wished I was on it." As I watched The Ghan - my train - swallowed up by darkness, the sound muting first to a rumble, then a hum, I think I understood.

Next time, I promised myself, nothing would separate us - The Ghan and I. I vowed I would stay on it, all the way. To Darwin, if I could.