"The Ghan" normally runs weekly year round. During December 2012 and January 2013 it ran only once every two weeks. Until 2016, a second service operated between June and September. The train stops at Alice Springs and Katherine so passengers have time for optional tours.
Each train has between 16 and 26 stainless steel carriages. These were built by Comeng, Granville in the late 1960s / early 1970s for the "Indian Pacific", plus a motorail wagon. The train is pulled by a Pacific National NR class locomotive. Sometimes, other locomotives such as an AN class or a DL class join the NR class to pull the train.
Starting in August 1929, "The Ghan" first ran on the Central Australian Railway. This was a narrow-gauge railway that went to Alice Springs. In 1957, the standard gauge Stirling North to Marree line opened, so the train only ran north of Marree. In October 1980 a new standard gauge line was built to the west of the original line. This was later extended north from Alice Springs to Darwin, opening in January 2004.
The Port Augusta to Government Gums Railway began in 1878 when Premier of South Australia, William Jervois, broke ground at Port Augusta. The line reached Hawker in June 1880, Beltana in July 1881, Marree in January 1884, and Oodnadatta in January 1891. In 1926 work began to build the line to Alice Springs. and that section was completed in 1929. Until then, the final part of the train journey was made by camel.
There were always plans to build the line to Darwin, but by the time the line to Alice Springs was built, "The Ghan" was losing money. Plans to reach Darwin were put on indefinite hold. The original line followed the same track as the overland telegraph, which is believed to be the route taken by John McDouall Stuart during his 1862 crossing of Australia.
Steam locomotives need a lot of water, and Stuart's route to Alice Springs was the only one that had available water. This meant that when it did rain, the creeks and rivers often washed the track away.
"The Ghan" service was well known for long delays caused by these washouts. A flatcar behind the locomotive carried spare sleepers and railway tools, so that if there was damage to the track, the passengers and crew could repair the line. During World War II the service had to be greatly expanded, putting great pressure on the limited water supplies. As a result, de-mineralisation towers, some of which survive to this day, were built along the track. This meant that bore water could be used in the locomotives. When the new line to Alice Springs was built in the 1970s, the use of diesel engines meant that there was far less need for water. The line could take the much drier route from Tarcoola to Alice Springs.
The original Ghan was shown in BBC Television's series "Great Railway Journeys of the World" in 1980, presented by Michael Frayn.
The original "Ghan" ran for the last time in 1980. The Ghan Preservation Society has repaired sections of the old narrow gauge track and some notable sidings. In October 1980 the new standard gauge line from Tarcoola on the Trans-Australian Railway to Alice Springs was opened. The new line is about west of the old line. This avoids the floodplains where the original line was often damaged by floods. It was also hoped that the new line would improve the train's timekeeping.
The modern "Ghan" was in an episode of Channel 5's series "Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways". In November 1998, one service went from Adelaide to Melbourne while from April 1999, the other went to Sydney.
Building the line between Alice Springs and Darwin is said to be the second-largest civil engineering project in Australia, the largest since the Snowy Mountains Scheme was built 1949–1974.
Work began in July 2001, with the first passenger train reaching Darwin on 4 February 2004, after 126 years of planning and waiting. The cost was A$1.3 billion.
"The Ghan's" arrival in Darwin started a new era of tourism in the Northern Territory. Travel to the area was easier, with better access to and for Aboriginal communities. The rail link will allow for more freight to travel through the region, leading to a hope that Darwin will serve as another trade link with Asia.
One of the locomotives was named after Steve Irwin to help promote the new service and tourism to the region.
Itanium
Itanium ( ) is a type of Intel microprocessors with 64-bit chip architecture (not related to the by now mainstream 64-bit CPUs made by Intel and others). Itanium processors are sometimes used today for servers. Itanium processors where originally designed by HP and Intel with Intel making producing them, and several manufacturers of systems used them; nowhere as many systems used as originally hoped for. By now mostly HP still supports systems using these chips.
Intel officially announced the end of life and product discontinuance of the Itanium CPU family on January 30, 2019.
When first released in 2001, Itanium's speed was disappointing compared to other processor types. Using existing x86 applications and operating systems was especially bad, with one test in 2001 showing that it was as fast as a 100 MHz Pentium (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time).
Itanium did not have success compared to IA-32 or RISC, and was even worse when x86-64 was released, which worked with older x86 applications.
In an article from 2009 about the history of Itanium — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos [bad situations] of the last 50 years" . Technology writer Ashlee Vance wrote that slowness in speed and release "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry." In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."
Both Red Hat and Microsoft said that they would stop allowing Itanium to be used with their operating systems. However, other Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Debian are still available for Itanium. On March 22, 2011, Oracle said they would no longer support Itanium, but support for their existing products would continue. In October 2013, Oracle said they would release Oracle Database 12.1.0.1.0 on HP-UX Itanium 11.31 by early 2014.
A past Intel company official said that Itanium had become profitable (Able to make a lot of money) for Intel in late 2009. In 2009 and later, Itanium was mostly used on servers by HP, which made 95% of Itanium servers, so the primary operating system for Itanium was HP-UX. On March 22, 2011, Intel said they will keep supporting Itanium entirely with many new Itanium chips being created and on-time.
Although Itanium did do well with high-end computing, Intel wanted it to have more usage compared to the original x86 architecture.
AMD decided on an easier idea, creating x86-64, a 64-bit addition to the x86 architecture, which Microsoft soon supported in Microsoft Windows, so Intel had to include the same type of 64-bit addition in Intel's x86 processors. x86-64 can use existing 32-bit applications at full hardware speed, but has 64-bit memory addressing and other additions to new applications. This architecture has now become the most used 64-bit architecture in the desktop and laptop market, with the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture powering many mobile devices, used in today's iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and now many Android phones and tablets such as the Nexus 6P and Nexus 9. Ssome Itanium-based workstations were initially introduced by companies such as SGI, but they are no longer available. Because AMD made the first x86-64 chip, the architecture is commonly referred to as "amd64" inside of operating systems.