Other sugar plantation railways were built to an even narrower gauge, 750 mm being the most common (an authoritative source suggests that 700 mm gauge was used for these railways, but I cannot corroborate this in any way, and all other sources state 750 mm gauge). There were also some 600 mm gauge railways, most of which have disappeared.

  One of the 750 mm gauge lines – the Aceh Tramway between Banda Aceh and Uleelhee in Sumatra – was originally built to 1067 mm gauge, then re-gauged to 750 mm.

  But Standard gauge hadn’t entirely disappeared from Indonesia, at least until South-East Asia entered World War II. During Indonesia’s occupation by Japan, from 1942 to 1945, a lot of the old 1435 mm gauge track still existed, mostly in Sumatra, but Japan then either converted it to 1067 mm gauge, or else dual gauged it, again, as we saw previously, to facilitate troop and munitions movements.

  Standard gauge may be making a comeback in Indonesia. New lines in Aceh in Sumatra have been built to 1435 mm gauge, while a railway on the island of Kalimantan, used to transport coal, is also built to Standard gauge. Will Indonesia gradually see more and more 1435 mm gauge rails?

  Today, Indonesia has 5000 km of 1067 mm gauge railways, of which just under 600 km are electrified. New lines are being proposed to rejuvenate the railways in the face of competition from both the private car and the airlines.

  With no metro to indicate whether the country will see more Standard gauge rails (only an incomplete monorail currently exists, in Jakarta), whether Indonesia adopts Standard gauge or remains at Cape gauge is something we shall know only in the future.

  PAPUA-NEW GUINEA

  There are essentially no railways in Papua-New Guinea, although there used to be some 610 mm narrow gauge plantation lines prior to World War I. Port Moresby, the country’s largest town and its capital, once had both 600/610 mm gauge and 1067 mm gauge tramways running up and down the port’s wharves. These have been closed since after World War II.

  A Standard gauge freight only railway was proposed in 2007 to run between the coast and a mining operation at Yandera, but is currently not yet built.

  AUSTRALIA

  If ever a country can be said to be utterly confused as to what gauge it should be building its railways, that country has to be Australia. The world often accuses the USA of ‘exceptionalism’ (being different for the sake of being different, even when that difference means accepting or producing something inferior), but, when it comes to railway gauges, Australia takes ‘exceptionalism’ to a whole new level.

  Certainly, Australia has probably the most complex gauge situation of any country in the world. And, while it is becoming a little more simplified over the years, it is far from being resolved. While the political will at the federal level to standardise on one gauge throughout the country is – finally – there, individual States, not to mention the huge costs involved, will transpire to thwart any quick remedy.

  The gauge issue in Australia is incredibly complicated, and I cannot begin to cover every single railway line, break of gauge, gauge conversion and other gauge issues that exist, or have existed, within the whole country – the story is far too big for this book! But I hope that I will cover all the important stuff, and that I have made it as simple as possible (even then the story is astonishingly convoluted, and I no doubt will leave the reader confused in some areas, while I fully expect to have got more than a few things wrong – even Australian railway buffs are not always in agreement as to which piece of track was at which gauge at which particular point in time).

  Australia is a federal country, like the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, and a number of other countries. As such, the federal government retains certain overall powers, while other powers are devolved down to the next level (States in Australia and the USA, Provinces in Canada, Cantons in Switzerland, Länder in Germany, and so on for other federal countries).

  In Canada, for example, it was the British-North America Act, passed in 1867 as part of Confederation, that set out the powers that were to be retained by the federal government, and those that passed down to the Provinces. In general, anything that was for the good of the country as a whole – such as defence – stayed with the federal government, while more local issues – such as social housing – cascaded down to the provinces and even areas within the provinces.

  Now in all of these countries, with the exception of Australia, the federal government at one point or another, especially during the formative era of their railway building, mandated by law as to what gauge the national railways system should be built. Even in the USA, where railways are almost exclusively privately owned and operated, and always have been, Congress legislated the gauge of the first transcontinental railway (see Part 7).

  No such thing happened in Australia, although it was a very close thing. The newly-enacted federal constitution, in 1901, provided for mandating the common use of Standard gauge. But that was too late – railway building had been happening for nearly fifty years by then, and the idea of making railways a federal responsibility was narrowly voted down by the six Colonies (as the individual States were called until united into a federal Australia). Instead, the federal government could only become involved with railway construction with each State’s consent, and only at a State-by-State level.

  It was very obvious that, in this land of individualists, the federal government was fearful of a backlash from the newly federated Colonies, and consequently failed to implement any significant movement towards a common gauge throughout the country. It was a capitulation that Australia is still paying for to this day.

  It is an interesting insight into the personality of early Australia. Nearly all countries in what we called the New World were intent on forging a national cohesion that would provide a platform on which the nation’s wealth and sense of nationhood could be built upon, and the railway – especially a national one – was invariably a key component in building that cohesion.

  Taking Canada again as an example, the driving of the last spike, and hence completion, in 1871 of the Standard gauge transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway between the cities of Toronto and Montreal in the east and Vancouver in British Columbia (BC) on the west coast was – and remains to this day – a symbol of Canadian national unity, and was the key prerequisite in persuading BC to remain in Confederation (this story will be covered in more detail in Part 7).

  Australia’s Colonies adopted an entirely different stance, and instead remained not only ferociously independent, but almost actively hostile to the idea of a federal government telling them what to do. They seemingly had little or no such sense of national unity, at least in terms of building the country’s railways in the 19th century. This lack of a federal vision during the time the railways were being built without any doubt had everything to do with the gauge issues Australia ended up embedding into its railway system.

  Not only that, Australia, when it did indeed become one united federated country, failed in later years to properly come to grips with the ensuing problems it now faces today, caused by a disparate network of railways, all built to varying gauges, and preventing, at least until relatively recently, a seamless transcontinental railway journey like the ones Canadians could experience in the 1870s.

  For many years therefore, a passenger, even as late as the end of the first half of the 20th century, starting their transcontinental journey in Sydney in the east, would travel on 1435 mm gauge tracks to Albury, at the border with the State of Victoria, where they would change trains for the 1600 mm broad gauge line to Melbourne. Another change of train was then necessary (though not because of gauge differences – the next train to from Melbourne to Adelaide was still on 1600 mm gauge rails), travelling via Adelaide to Port Pirie, in South Australia (or sometimes to Terowie, just east of Port Pirie, via Quorn).

  At Port Pirie, as well as at Gladstone, also in South Australia (between Adelaide and Port Augusta, and 38 km east of Port Pirie), no fewer than three gauges met up, sometimes sharing the same trackbed. Another change of train then ensued for our frustrated traveller, this time on to 1067 mm gauge tracks for the short hop to Port Augusta.

  Yet another change of train was then required for the Standard gauge line to Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia (at this point in time the only significant length of Standard gauge rails outside of New South Wales). With one more change of train, the final segment to Perth was completed on 1067 mm gauge tracks.

  If the poor passenger’s journey had originated in Brisbane, no fewer than six changes of train were necessary, of which five were due to gauge differences. To add to the passengers’ pain, some of these changes of train occurred in the middle of the night – for example, passengers in the 1950s, on arriving at Peterborough, in South Australia, had to change trains at 4 am for the next train to Port Pirie.

  Breaks of gauge were not only confined to Colonial or State boundaries. Every Colony or State had a break of gauge within its borders. It was hardly an inducement to travel between or even within States, let alone from one end of the country to the other, something that the States seemed to have been blind to (or perhaps they deliberately wanted to discourage interstate travel, for whatever reasons).

  While air travel has perhaps ameliorated that constraint in Australia’s development, at least as far as the country’s citizens are concerned, these gauge change problems did – and still do – provide unnecessary obstacles in moving goods around the country. Only in the very recent past are these gauge differences finally getting resolved, at least to a large degree even if not completely.

  Today Australia has a total of over 40 000 km of track, of all three main gauges (not counting the narrow gauge sugar cane railways – see later). Standard gauge now forms the majority of this route distance, and is steadily increasing as more routes and networks get converted. About 500 km is dual gauge (mostly Standard and either broad or narrow gauge). Some 3000 km of line is electrified, again encompassing all three gauges.

  History Outline:

  When researching both the history of Australia’s railways and where they’re at today, it was immediately apparent that further untangling the complexity of the gauge situation was going to be no easy task. I looked at two primary ways of approaching it:

  Create a nationally-based timeline that logged the beginning of each gauge’s railways, and recording each change in gauge along the way (there were many);

  Create an overall general history of the country’s railways, followed by a separate history timeline for each Colony/State, with a look at how each played its part in developing Australia’s total railway system as it exists today.

  I decided that method 1 above would be too complex and boring – a very confusing and tangled monologue of facts and figures that would fail to capture the drama that surrounded the creation of an Australian national railway system. Method 2 on the other hand would enable me to break things down into manageable chunks, and place each piece of this story into proper context.

  Main History:

  Railways came to Australia some years after they had appeared in other parts of the new world, such as America and Canada. Even when they did arrive, their development was slow and disjointed, reflecting the country’s lack of a unified vision (see above). Certainly any assistance from the country’s ultimate rulers in Great Britain was actively eschewed.

  Maybe it was because federalism came relatively late to Australia, in 1901, but each Colony up until then, and even beyond, ignored advice from London – and indeed its own highest level of government at the time – to build all railways to Standard gauge. With the exception of New South Wales (NSW), each Colony instead chose (or left it to private companies to choose – most railways were initially privately owned) the gauge of its railway system. And virtually without exception, they chose something different from Standard gauge.

  It was not supposed to be that way. In 1846 – the year that Great Britain passed its Gauge Act mandating 1435 mm as the nation’s railway gauge (see Part 1) – a committee was appointed to look at building Australia’s first railways.

  The Colonial Secretary of the day, one Mr Gladstone, in that same year, some eight years before the first railway in Australia was actually built, had already recommended to the Governor of NSW, Charles Fitzroy, that Standard gauge should be adopted for all of the country’s proposed new railways. He was backed up two years later, in 1848, by Earl Grey, under-secretary to the colonies, and a man who (besides being famous for creating a unique blend of tea) was a vehement proponent of a federal Australia. Grey also urged the Governor of NSW to adopt a uniform gauge, and that that gauge should be Standard gauge. And Grey, having succeeded in persuading the Colonies of NSW, Victoria and South Australia to adopt Standard gauge, almost got his way.

  Before the use of Standard gauge could be enshrined into law, however, the first company in Australia building a railway ended up employing an Irish engineer, Sir Francis Shields, who requested, in a submission to Earl Grey, that a wider gauge – the Irish gauge of 5 ft 3 in, or 1600 mm, and already approved in Ireland under the Gauge Act – be adopted instead. Earl Grey consented to this request, and NSW started proceedings to legislate the Irish gauge as the standard railway gauge, not only in NSW, but in the neighbouring Colonies of Victoria and South Australia as well.

  This could have settled matters as far as mandating a single gauge throughout Australia, albeit at a wider gauge than 1435 mm – except that Shields resigned very suddenly after his salary was drastically reduced. He was immediately replaced by an engineer, James Wallace, from Scotland. Wallace objected to the use of Irish gauge, and asked that Standard gauge be reinstated, citing any number of practical reasons as justification. This revision was approved, and in 1853 NSW once again made Standard gauge mandatory for use in that Colony.

  And, almost like petulant teenagers rebelling against their overbearing parents (the parents being effectively New South Wales), the neighbouring Colonies of Victoria and South Australia seemed to deliberately choose a gauge (or gauges – Victoria had two gauges within its borders and South Australia had three) that was different than the gauge in NSW.

  In what has been termed ‘interstate intransigence’, Victoria threw its toys out of its pram and decided it wanted nothing to do with the NSW-approved Standard gauge. Some say it was because it had not been made aware of the NSW decision to revert to Standard gauge. Others say it was because it simply wanted to be different, especially as it had apparently already ordered broad gauge rolling stock. Whatever the reason, it stuck to the previously approved, but not mandated, Irish 1600 mm gauge.

  That left NSW in a bit of a quandary, as to whether to abandon Standard gauge and go back to using Irish gauge, or stick to its intended path. Its decision was not made any easier by John Whitton, a railway engineer imported from Britain to oversee NSW’s railway construction, and who favoured the use of 1600 mm gauge in NSW, even though the Colony had already committed to Standard gauge.

  South Australia added to NSW’s quandary, as it, like Victoria, turned its nose up at the prospect of adhering to NSW’s mandated Standard gauge, and instead also retained Irish gauge. Then, as if it was having second thoughts, South Australia later added Cape gauge (1067 mm) for good measure (again, almost as if any gauge will do as long as it wasn’t NSW’s use of Standard gauge).

  [Although I’ve used the well-recognised term Cape gauge to denote a gauge of 1067 mm, Australians prefer to use the term ‘narrow gauge’. However, because this book encompasses so many different narrow gauges, even in Australia, I’ve chosen to continue using Cape gauge where it means a gauge of 1067 mm.]

  Both Queensland and Western Australia liked the idea of Cape gauge (especially as it promised to be cheaper to construct than Standard gauge – Queensland particularly was a very poor State at this juncture in Australia’s history), so their railways were also built to this 1067 mm gauge.

  The Colonies may have been somewhat defiant in rejecting the use of Standard gauge, but the Commonwealth, still in the guise of NSW, decided to stick to its guns. Under the supervision of Whitton, it chose to adhere to 1435 mm gauge for all the railways over which it had jurisdiction, notwithstanding Whitton’s earlier stated preference for Irish gauge. By 1889 Whitton had engineered the building of over 3500 km of Standard gauge line. By all appearances Standard gauge seemed to be settled upon as the preferred gauge for NSW, and remained the recommended gauge for the other Colonies.

  Except it wasn’t, at least not totally. When the Commonwealth, which then had jurisdiction over South Australia and the Northern Territories (NT), built the North-South railway, from Port Augusta in South Australia to Port Darwin in the far north of NT, it chose Cape gauge, which, although against its own policy, was presumably chosen in order to link up with the new 1067 mm gauge lines in South Australia.

  This on-going use of whatever gauge took anyone’s fancy was an extraordinarily damaging strategy (if indeed it can be called that) to follow – one that Mr Gladstone had already forewarned as being a harbinger of ‘misunderstandings, short-sightedness, impecuniosity, vacillation and sheer obstinacy’. Mr Gladstone was obviously not one to mince his words.

  I said above that Australia has chronically failed to come to grips with its gauge problems. But it did try, and on many occasions. In 1889, British army officer Major-General James Bevan Edwards observed that the railways had little strategic value while breaks of gauge prevented free movement of troops and munitions between different parts of the country – an observation that was remarkably prescient when World War II was at its height many years later.

  In that same year, 1889, Mr Eddy, Chief Commissioner for Railways of New South Wales, urged the Premier, Sir Henry Parkes, to adopt Standard gauge throughout all Colonies. Eddy’s advice was ignored.

 

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