AH Challenge: United Australian Gauge

Find a POD no earlier than the foundation of New South Wales (1788) where instead of the OTL hodgepodge of railway gauges that plague the Australian railway network, the country--either before or at union--chooses a single, continent-wide gauge as standard (it does not, just to be clear, have to be OTL "standard gauge". You could pick some type of broad or narrow gauge, instead, such as the OTL Queensland standard or the Indian gauge). Since the federalization of the (state-owned) railroads was actually quite narrowly defeated at Federation, which would probably have established some type of "standard", this should be fairly easy.
 
Bump. I think Rian had a post for this thread he accidentally put in the other gauge thread I recently started. Anyone else want to take a crack at it?
 
Dunno, it'd have to be some obscure political decision way back when, probably made by conincidence.
 
Given that other polities (like Canada, Britain, the US) all started out with multiple gauges and ended up with a much smaller set, I think the LIKELY result is a set of standard gauges, in particular a narrow gauge and a more normal one, possibly a third, broad gauge. It's possible that Australia might keep a narrow gauge for more than just mountains/mining areas (which is pretty much what narrow gauge was relegated to in North America), but narrowing down to 2 (or 3) is probably the most likely across TL's.

What PoD would be required, I'm sure I don't know. But since everybody else got rid of their multiplicity of gauges, there ought to be SOME PoD that would work.
 
Given that other polities (like Canada, Britain, the US) all started out with multiple gauges and ended up with a much smaller set, I think the LIKELY result is a set of standard gauges, in particular a narrow gauge and a more normal one, possibly a third, broad gauge. It's possible that Australia might keep a narrow gauge for more than just mountains/mining areas (which is pretty much what narrow gauge was relegated to in North America), but narrowing down to 2 (or 3) is probably the most likely across TL's.

What PoD would be required, I'm sure I don't know. But since everybody else got rid of their multiplicity of gauges, there ought to be SOME PoD that would work.

Well, I mentioned one in the OP that might work out. IOTL, in the negotiations leading up to Federation, there was a proposal to federalize the state-owned and operated railroads (Australia being too thinly settled for private corporations to effectively develop railroads). It was narrowly defeated, but if it had gone through and made railroads a federal obligation rather than a state one, there would have been significant pressure to standardize due to the large efficiency penalties caused by multiple gauges, especially prior to containerization.

One of the most likely sources of extra "standard" gauges is Tasmania, since they obviously aren't connected to the other states and hence have a much more negative cost:benefit comparison (it being expensive to standardize them for little benefit) than the other state lines.
 
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