One notable narrow gauge line not closed is the Zig Zag Railway at Lithgow. It is one of the few lines in NSW converted FROM Standard gauge to a different gauge – in this case, Cape gauge, 1067 mm. Originally part of the old Standard gauge main line from Sydney, and opened in 1869, it was side-tracked in 1910 when a new deviation was built, and finally closed after World War II. In 1975, it was re-opened as a tourist line, at which time its gauge was changed from 1435 mm to 1067 mm. Rolling stock was sourced from 1067 mm gauge railways in other States.

  Victoria:

  Our last, and smallest, State in mainland Australia is Victoria, home, not only to the broad gauge of 1600 mm, but to three other gauges as well. The main lines however were built to 1600 mm broad gauge.

  The first railway in the Colony ran in September, 1854, between Melbourne and what was then known as Sandridge (today, Port Melbourne).

  The gauge of 1600 mm was chosen – as recounted above – when Sir Francis Shields, the Irish engineer who started to build railways in NSW, switched to his Irish gauge of 1600 mm for the project, even after 1435 mm gauge had already been selected. Victoria, at that time under the direction of NSW, followed suit.

  While NSW of course reverted back to Standard gauge after Shields resigned, Victoria remained with the broad gauge, ostensibly because it had already ordered broad gauge locomotives and rolling stock. While there may have been an element of truth in that, it was probably as much as anything else another case of the ‘interstate intransigence’ that has characterised every aspect of Australia’s railways, especially in choosing gauges.

  Lines stretching out into the countryside were then built throughout the 1850s and 1860s, almost all to the west and south-west, and all to the broad gauge. The North-East Line, also to the broad gauge, was the first line to branch out in the opposite direction, ending at Albury, on the NSW border. The building of this line was initiated as early as 1860, although it would not be until 1883 that trains actually started running.

  Eventually a large network of both suburban and regional broad gauge railways spread out from Melbourne. By the 1880s, Victoria was experiencing a ‘land boom’, and the railways were an integral part of enabling the boom to continue – land speculators were buying cheap land, and then pushing for new lines to be built to service it, thereby raising land prices.

  All these lines were to the by-now default 1600 mm gauge. It seemed that there was no way that Victoria was ever going to see Standard gauge rails within its borders – Albury was now the established break of gauge with NSW’s Standard gauge trains, while the connection with South Australia was already on broad gauge tracks, even if crossing the State boundary still needed a change of train.

  But Victoria was to see Standard gauge tracks within its borders, as did every other State in Australia. Standard gauge rails are now to be seen from one end of Victoria to the other.

  In 1962, the main line between Melbourne and the NSW border at Albury was paralleled with a Standard gauge track, and then converted completely between Seymour and Albury to 1435 mm gauge. This line is being upgraded, and new Standard gauge bridges have been built across the Murray River floodplain, opened in 2013, along with 200 km of new Standard gauge track. Since June 2011 Standard gauge only passenger trains now run between Melbourne and Albury.

  The main line to Geelong and into South Australia was similarly converted to partially true dual gauge and partially parallel broad/Standard gauge tracks to permit through running. In this case, the line to some extent echoes the North-East Line – twin 1600 mm gauge tracks and one 1435 mm gauge track from Melbourne to Geelong, then a single track of each gauge beyond, with some dual gauging in shunting and switching yards and the like. Passenger trains are to be found on both gauges.

  The regional lines to Ararat, Swan Hill and Bairnsdale out of Melbourne are all currently to 1600 mm broad gauge. Whether they will get converted is unknown – certainly today there is a case for it.

  Passenger services in Victoria (other than the Melbourne metro – see below) are all run by V/Line – and, as we saw in Perth, it means that the operator has to run and maintain what are two quite separate fleets of locomotives and rolling stock, neither of which can venture on to the tracks of the other, except where those tracks are dual gauged.

  Even the freight-only lines are a mix of Standard and broad gauges, often paralleling each other. Again, such a situation represents a duplication of track, motive power and rolling stock, each of which is confined to its own gauge, and its usage can never be optimised when traffic imbalances would favour transfer between lines.

  Narrow gauge:

  There were a handful of railways in Victoria, using the Cape gauge of 1067 mm, or even narrower. One such 1067 mm gauge railway was the Fyansford Cement Works Railway, which was an industrial railway near Geelong. It closed in 1966.

  Other lines were built to even narrower gauges, especially those venturing into mountainous territory, with 914 mm and 762 mm being the most common. In the 1890s, the government decided that some rural communities needed to have their own rail link, but using a gauge narrower than 1600 mm. After consultation with Everard Calthrop, a railway engineer in Britain, the gauge of 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) was decided upon, after the even narrower gauge of 610 mm, as used in India for the hill railways (see Part 5), was considered and rejected.

  Four such lines were built. All of these lines had closed by the 1960s, though two of these have since been rebuilt and now survive as heritage tourist lines. They are the Puffing Billy Railway and the Moe to Walhalla Railway.

  Trams and metros:

  Like other cities, especially in Australia, it is sometimes hard to differentiate between regional/commuter lines and those of a true metro. In Melbourne, the closest thing to a metro is what is colloquially known as the City Loop, which is a circular section of the suburban rail network within the central business district, partly underground and partly at ground level or elevated, and connected to and fed by the sixteen radial suburban lines.

  As part of the total electrified suburban network, it is of course to 1600 mm gauge.

  Melbourne’s trams, on the other hand, are to 1435 mm Standard gauge. In terms of route distance, it is the largest tram system in the world (250 km), surpassing even that in St. Petersburg (240 km), Berlin (190 km) or Moscow (180 km), while nearly 500 trams constitute the fleet. Considering that Melbourne, while big, is not that huge a city (4 million), and Australia is a country that has long embraced the automobile, the extent of Melbourne’s tram system is quite remarkable.

  The first trams in Melbourne were cable operated, and built to Standard gauge. Quite why is not recorded, especially when the main-line railways in Victoria were already operating to the 1600 mm broad gauge. Most likely it was to procure readily available Standard gauge trams already in production in Britain and elsewhere, although this cannot be verified.

  In 1889, Melbourne’s first electric tram opened, to be closed just seven years later. This too was to Standard gauge. But the next line to open did not follow this gauge convention.

  In 1904, the Victorian Railways company was formed, and built Melbourne’s first broad gauge street railway. It appears that this railway was built to the main-line broad gauge in order to enable its trams to be moved along the St. Kilda Railway, with which it connected, for servicing. This line remained at the broad gauge until conversion to Standard gauge in 1987, when it became a light railway.

  Any consideration regarding the ability to run trams over main-line tracks was apparently not necessary for the Victorian Railways’ second line, between Sandringham railway station and Black Rock, which, like the cable tramways still operating, was built to Standard gauge. As with some of the main lines today, certainly in Victoria and Western Australia, it appears that railway operators there had no qualms about running essentially two entirely different systems, one to Standard gauge and one to a different gauge.

  Also converted to Standard gauge was the very first railway between Melbourne and what was then known as Sandridge (see above). The conversion was part of incorporating this line into the Standard gauge tram network.

  Currently Melbourne’s trams are a mixture of the old and the new, with many models in between, but all to 1435 mm gauge. As the old trams get retired, they often are found in the unlikeliest of places – with the USA providing a home for the largest number. Melbourne’s retired Standard gauge trams are (or were) still running in Memphis, Seattle (I have ridden on the Waterfront line myself, and can confirm that the trams are in ‘original’ condition, complete with Australian adverts!), San Francisco (on the city’s new ‘F’ Line), San Jose, Dallas, and New Orleans (no longer operating there), as well as potential operation in Minnesota and Iowa.

  Finally, there are some other tram systems in Victoria besides that in Melbourne. The city of Bendigo, in the northern part of the State, currently operates a tourist line. Like with Melbourne’s trams, this operates on Standard gauge rails.

  Other towns in Victoria also have heritage tram systems, and these too are invariably built to Standard gauge.

  Tasmania:

  The very last State on our itinerary through Australia is Tasmania, the separate island on the south-eastern tip of the mainland. Being an island, there was not really any necessity to retain gauge commonality with the mainland.

  Nor, being a fairly small island, would one think that its railways would involve more than one gauge. The reader however must think again. Tasmania, echoing just about everywhere else in Australia, was home to two gauges – 1600 mm and 1067 mm.

  The broad gauge arrived first, in the form of the line between Deloraine and Launceston, in 1871. This was followed by the narrow gauge in 1876, when a 1067 mm gauge line was built between Hobart to Evandale. Other 1067 mm gauge lines followed. Naturally (and perhaps unbelievably for such a small island – less than 300 km in any one direction), the existence of the two gauges created at least one of the dreaded and hated breaks of gauge.

  The break of gauge caused its usual problems until the broad gauge line was converted in 1888 to the narrow gauge seen everywhere else in Tasmania.

  Today, the system is still in operation, albeit struggling to survive, with most of its motive power and rolling stock hand-me-downs from other railways on the mainland.

  Standard gauge lines today:

  There cannot be very many developed countries (if any) that had no direct rail connections between its various parts until well into the twentieth century. Yet Australia was one such country. Unlike in, say, Canada, which saw its first inter-provincial rail links in the 1860s, Australia had to wait until as late as 1930 to see its first interstate connection that didn’t involve a break of gauge, when the city of Brisbane was connected with NSW by means of a Standard gauge link.

  That long delay was of course the result of the decades of failure by all those successive governments and commissions attempting to achieve uniformity in the country’s railway gauges, as told in the early parts of this long chapter. But what was referred to as ‘interstate intransigence’ only began to be seriously overcome nearly 100 years after the first railways had appeared.

  What was known as the Commonwealth Railways kicked off the process of converting to Standard gauge, around 1915, four years after the first Standard gauge main line was built as far as Kalgoorlie. But its efforts did not get very far.

  It wasn’t until well into the second half of the 20th century, in 1962, that the country’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as the national capital Canberra, were all directly linked by a railway of a single gauge – that gauge of course being Standard.

  It then took a further 8 years before it became possible to travel from coast to coast on the same train, in 1970, and a further 34 years, in 2004, before every State capital was connected with a Standard gauge railway line. Yet, although today there are nearly 20 000 km of Standard gauge track in Australia, that represents just half of the total. The job of converting to Standard gauge is far from complete, and may never be complete.

  The multiplicity of gauges probably didn’t matter too much in the early days, before Colonies, then States, began to link up. Even when they did begin to link up, it probably didn’t matter too much what that gauge was, as long as it was all the same. With Australia being an island, there was no need to think about linking up with any other country’s railways, though obviously, considering how large Australia is, the wider the gauge the better.

  Australia is currently committed to Standard gauge as far as is possible. With the principle of ‘open access’ now fully in place, train operators, both freight and passenger, want a uniform gauge wherever they may decide to run trains.

  The most recent of the many attempts to achieve a uniform Standard gauge is the ‘One Nation’ program put in place by the federal government in the mid-1990s. It wants to see the entire country converted to Standard gauge. How likely is that to happen?

  Four main parts of the country remain where further significant Standard gauge encroachment has yet to be implemented – the metropolitan area of Perth (1067 mm), that of Adelaide (1600 mm), and that of Melbourne (1600 mm), as well as all of Queensland north of Brisbane (1067 mm). Those metropolitan areas of Perth and Melbourne already face the headache of having a single train operator operate two quite separate fleets, each of which can never venture on the other’s rails – something that would be a huge advantage when imbalances in ridership create the need for the transfer of trains from one line to another. These areas would be prime candidates for conversion to Standard gauge – something that was recommended by the 1921 Royal Commission!

  Adelaide does appear to be further ahead, where gauge conversion already is well advanced, and there will likely come a time when all of that city’s railways are to Standard gauge, even if much of the State still plays host to dual Standard/ broad gauge.

  Other parts of the country’s railways are also earmarked for conversion, such as the broad gauge line between Mildura and Geelong, to connect with the Adelaide-Melbourne main line which was converted in 1998.

  Queensland is the big question mark. Unlike the other States, where separation of track and train operators is the norm, all railways in that State are government owned. Consequently, that government can wield a big stick when it comes to complying with any directives to convert anything to Standard gauge.

  While Standard gauge trains run into Brisbane, that is the only place you will see them in Queensland (other than on the occasional private line), and no further north do they presently travel in that State. Furthermore, with Queensland’s progress in improving the dynamics of 1067 mm gauge trains (including operating the fastest trains in the country), it may well see little if any advantage in converting the entire State’s railways to Standard gauge. It will most likely be the last hold-out for a gauge different from Standard – the final example of ‘interstate intransigence’

  NEW ZEALAND

  New Zealand, our last but one country in this Part, played host to all three of the same gauges found in its large neighbour to the north-west. But in New Zealand’s case, the reasons, as well as the eventual outcome, were very different.

  New Zealand’s first railway, built in 1863, was to the same Irish broad gauge of 1600 mm as was already to be found in Victoria in Australia – which made sense, as the line was to be equipped with Victoria’s surplus motive power and rolling stock. But the choice of that gauge did not in any way mean it would become the ‘default’, as usually happened when the first railway set the gauge.

  Within the next ten years, both Standard gauge and Cape gauge lines had also opened, either privately owned or under the auspices of the provincial governments of the day. This had the very real potential of instigating a gauge war in New Zealand all its own.

  But that was not to be. In 1876, provinces in New Zealand were abolished. There could never be any of the ‘interstate intransigence’ that had characterised Australia’s railways. Instead, the central government, under Premier Sir Julius Vogel, took control over all railways, and, in 1881, passed the Railway Construction and Land Act, which decreed that the gauge henceforth in New Zealand should be 3 ft 6 in (1067 mm) Cape gauge. This applied whether any railways were publicly or privately owned. It was, in effect, a copy of what had happened in mother country Great Britain in 1846 when the Gauge Act was passed (see Parts 1 and 2).

  The reasons for selecting the narrow gauge were, at the time, quite logical – New Zealand was a very mountainous country, and not a particularly rich one. The narrow gauge would assist in facilitating railway construction on both counts. Those railways already in operation and to a different gauge were to be converted.

  Throughout the remainder of the 19th century and even into the 20th century, a dozen or more lines opened, many in extremely difficult territory, often involving incredible feats of railway engineering. One of the most famous was the Raurimu Spiral on the North Island Main Trunk Railway. Rising over 130 m in 2 km in a straight line, the line spirals in a double horseshoe curve before crossing over itself, stretching the distance travelled to almost 7 km, and incorporating curves sharper than could have been accommodated on a wider gauge. It is indeed a demonstrable vindication of the choice of the narrow gauge.

  Even more spectacular was the Rimutaka Incline, opened in 1878, and closed in 1955. Again to 1067 mm gauge, it crested a rise of 350 m in under 5 km, using the Fell rack system. Tentative plans have been put forward to re-open the line.

 

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