The railway was never meant to be a tourist attraction. It began in 1878 at Port Augusta as the South Australian Railways' line to service mining and to reach the inland, climbing through Pichi Richi Pass and opening at Quorn in 1879. From there it crept north for decades, reaching Government Gums, now Farina, in 1882, then Marree and finally Oodnadatta by 1891. Renamed the Great Northern Railway in 1882 and later the Central Australia Railway, the narrow-gauge line eventually stretched 1,225 kilometres to Stuart, the settlement renamed Alice Springs in 1933. It never reached the true centre of the continent, yet for a century it was a lifeline for isolated outback communities, a vital supply route in the Second World War, and the track that carried the famous passenger train, The Ghan.

The pass, and the railway, take their name from a word far older than any locomotive. Pichi Richi is thought to derive from the region's role as a traditional source of pituri, a preparation of native leaves and ash chewed as a stimulant by First Nations people, traded across vast distances of inland Australia. There was once a township called Pichi Richi in the pass itself, and the preservation society took its name from the place. To ride the line is to move through layers of history at once: an Aboriginal trading landscape, a colonial engineering feat, and the corridor that knitted remote settlements to the coast long before sealed roads existed.

On 22 July 1973 the not-for-profit Pichi Richi Railway Preservation Society was incorporated, its first purpose simply to protect the 1878 dry stone walls and the bridges of the pass from demolition. Restoring trains seemed a distant dream, yet just twelve months after they began, volunteers ran their first service up to Summit. Repair by repair, they pushed the working line onward, to Pichi Richi, to Woolshed Flat, back to Stirling North, and in 2001 completed a hard-won extension all the way into Port Augusta, threading the narrow gauge beneath an active coal line through a purpose-built underpass. More than fifty years on, the railway is still entirely run and staffed by its volunteer members, operating between March and November each year.

The fleet itself is a rolling museum. Its rarest treasure is Steam Motor Coach No. 1, the beloved "Coffee Pot," an ornate self-propelled steam railcar whose engine was built by Kitson and Company of Leeds in 1905 and which entered service in 1906, today the last operating example of its kind anywhere in the world. The Afghan Express recreates Ghan travel of the 1930s and 1940s using 1920s carriages, often hauled by NM25, an original Ghan locomotive built in 1925 and one of only two of its class to survive. One restored carriage carries an astonishing wartime story: in 1942 it brought General Douglas MacArthur and his family south from Alice Springs after their escape from the Philippines, on the journey during which, changing trains at nearby Terowie on 20 March, he made his famous vow, "I came through and I shall return."