Today most rail travel in New Zealand is concentrated in the Auckland and Wellington regions, where 1067 mm gauge commuter trains provide typical suburban networks.

  However, both Auckland and Christchurch currently run heritage tram systems – and these, unlike the main-line railways, are to Standard gauge. That in Christchurch is suspended due to the devastating earthquake that city experienced a little while ago.

  Wellington had a 1219 mm gauge tram system, closed in 1965. Its vehicles and track are now housed in a museum 45 km from the city. Some photos of the museum show dual gauge track (presumably 1219 and 1435 mm).

  FIJI

  Our final country in this Part, Fiji, is almost too easy to pass over in the South Pacific. As far as railways are concerned, however, there isn’t much to tell.

  All railways in Fiji were built solely to serve the sugar cane industry, and they mirror almost exactly the same trains in Australia (see above). An astonishing total of nearly 700 km of narrow gauge lines were built – mostly to 610 mm gauge, but also (and constituting the first railways in Fiji) to 762 mm gauge.

  Even more astonishingly, nearly 600 km of the 610 mm gauge railways still survive, including a small tourist line, the Coral Coast Railway, that runs between Sigatoka and Viti Levu. How long it will continue to remain operational is open to speculation – most reports say the trackwork is now in very poor condition, with frequent derailments, while some reports say that the railway has closed down altogether. Certainly, like elsewhere, road transportation is slowly usurping the railway as a means of getting the goods and raw materials from the point of production to the ports and factories, in spite of government initiatives to keep as much as possible on the railways.

  ON TO PART 7…

  This Part, Part 6, has been by far the longest so far – and due almost entirely to the extraordinary situation regarding rail gauges in Australia. Whether or not that country ever sorts out its seemingly intractable disparity in railway gauges remains to be seen.

  But certainly the portents are there. Ever more of Australia’s national, and even local, railway network is being built, or being converted, to Standard gauge. Maybe Australia, at some unidentified point in the future, will enjoy the seamless rail travel that a uniform gauge permits other countries to enjoy – countries that, when they were building their railways, could look beyond local narrow interests and embrace a national dream.

  The final part of our odyssey around the world takes us into the Americas – starting with South America, progressing through Central America, and ending with the USA and Canada – two countries that are so similar in so many ways, yet so different. Those differences can perhaps be exemplified no better than by how their railways developed – and how the gauges of those railways shaped each of those two wonderful countries in their own individual way.

  Join me on the final segment of our incredible story of how railway gauges, far from being a minor technical issue, have instead shaped the very world we live in, and helped make the world what it is today.

  Michael Frewston

  © Frewston Books Online 2016.

 

 

  Michael Frewston, South-East Asia and Australasia

 

 

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