AHC Downunder: Australian mainline railways standardise on 5'3'' gauge

The first railway in this country was right here in Melbourne, between Melbourne town (now our CBD) and Sandridge (now a suburb called Port Melbourne). It was built to the track gauge mentioned above, also the track gauge used in Ireland.
New South Wales originally agreed to build to this gauge too but changed their mind after we started construction.
The idea is to imagine that New South Wales and Victoria both build to the gauge on which they originally agreed.
 
Closer economic ties are the obvious benefit. Without the need to change trains at the border the flow of goods and people are much easier.

The problem is that Irish broad is more expensive than standard gauge to build, which will cause big problems when the other colonies come to build their networks.

Edit: Meant narrow gauge. It's much cheaper are more suited to mountainous areas.
 
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The key is NSW, it has the same gauge as Victoria then there is a good chance that railway infrastructure will come under the federal government at federation. If that occurred then the last century would have been spent making improvement rather than interstate bickering and fixing mistakes.
 
And one of those improvements would have been more level crossing removals in the Melbourne Metropolitan area. I can't think of any others.

Also, I think Western Australia is our flattest state, and yet (as I know) their railways are narrow gauge. Queensland is the other narrow gauge state on the mainland and as far as I know, most of their mainline trackage is away from the Mountains.

Without the need to change trains at borders, it may have been harder for road transport to compete.
 
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NZ also toyed with this gauge before focusing on narrow gauge. I think Canterbury built about 100 km or so on the main line north and south before centralisation of the country in the 1870s. They then relayed those sections.
 
WA is standard gauge but with no mountains and tunnels the loading gauge is huge for double stacked containers and the like.
 
I thought only the interstate lines serving Werstern Australia were standard gauge, I know Perth suburban is narrow gauge.
It puzzles me that they didn't chose broad gauge given how flat they are.

I didn't know that New Zealand ever used this track gauge.
 
I thought only the interstate lines serving Werstern Australia were standard gauge, I know Perth suburban is narrow gauge.
It puzzles me that they didn't chose broad gauge given how flat they are.

I didn't know that New Zealand ever used this track gauge.

We dabbled a bit with railways before the country moved from a semi federal provincial model. IIRC that was one reason why we moved to a unitary state, it was thought to be easier to build the country's infrastructure and get loans. Some of the provinces went bust whilst trying to achieve this. They were also very small.
 
I thought only the interstate lines serving Werstern Australia were standard gauge, I know Perth suburban is narrow gauge.
It puzzles me that they didn't chose broad gauge given how flat they are.

It's not uncommon for disconnected lines, like commuter railways, to choose track gauges different from those normally used. For instance, I think most people would agree with me that the track gauge used in the United States is standard, yet BART uses a very broad 'Indian gauge' of 5' 6". Similar broad gauges are used by a few other transit systems, while many others, such as the Washington Metro, use narrow gauges.

The important thing is the mainlines and their branches; isolated systems serving specific purposes, like commuter lines or logging/mining railways can have different gauges more suited to their particular role without affecting the overall picture, since their rolling stock doesn't mix with stock from other lines in any case.
 
But the BART seems to be the only broad gauge heavy rail installation left anywhere in North America, despite that fact that many early North American railways were built to a wider gauge than standard. And it began only in the 1970s.
It has other non-standard features, and its fleet renewal is more expensive than international standards.
 
But the BART seems to be the only broad gauge heavy rail installation left anywhere in North America, despite that fact that many early North American railways were built to a wider gauge than standard. And it began only in the 1970s.
It has other non-standard features, and its fleet renewal is more expensive than international standards.

But much of the broader gauge in the US was in the South, pre-Civil War. The winning Union imposed the (much more common in the Union) standard gauge.

I'm not saying there wasn't a variety of gauges, even in the North, at the time, but the North was overwhelmingly standard.
 
Gauge in North America

Canada also started with 5'6'' and the south also had a similar gauge, yet Northern US did use a gauge narrower than either of them.
 
Canada also started with 5'6'' and the south also had a similar gauge, yet Northern US did use a gauge narrower than either of them.

A variety of gauges were used, more or less based on what the founders of early railroads fancied and could get. These early lines were basic "coast-interior" links with little interest in interlinking, so this wasn't really a problem. As they grew into a real network, though, it became a problem, and railroads began to standardize on a single gauge. This turned out to be standard gauge for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the transcontinental railroad legislation specified it, but it would have turned out that way in any case as the United States turned inwards economically. (As far as why the Northern standard was chosen instead of the Southern or Canadian, that is really quite simple: the North was way more important, economically, and had more lines)

Which gets back to my original point; for disconnected lines, the choice of gauge is much more arbitrary than for mainlines or branch lines (although it does appear that Western Australia does use narrow gauge for most lines). The important thing is intercity lines, not commuter railroads.
 
A possible knock on effect might parallel a comment I read about Spanish Railways, which were also built to the 5' 6" gauge. (Apparently one of the reasons was that, because the terrain is so often mountainous, the designers wanted sufficient scope for the construction of larger, more powerful locomotives.) The resulting increase in construction costs hampered branch line, hence rural, development but with the introduction of paved highways, left fewer low traffic lines to be abandoned.

I don't know how much Australia's frontier areas were economically sustained by low density branch lines (as opposed to long distance main lines) but the economic limitations of a broad gauge could have hampered things. Perhaps leading to (as others have hinted above) to a common interstate railway gauge/system (which would remain intact to this day) but more limited networks of narrower gauge lines in specific areas (which would be either broadened or abandoned by now)
. Much development would be stalled until about the 1920's but economic dislocations of the like seen in rural USA and Canada in the 1980's/1990's would be avoided.
 
IIRC, common carrier railroads in North America settled on what we call standard gauge (4' 8½") in the 1880s (albeit there were a few narrow gauge common carriers in ME and CO). Do I understand the thrust of this thread that Australia has never standardized on a single rail gauge? If so, I'm rather surprised.
 
IIRC, common carrier railroads in North America settled on what we call standard gauge (4' 8½") in the 1880s (albeit there were a few narrow gauge common carriers in ME and CO). Do I understand the thrust of this thread that Australia has never standardized on a single rail gauge? If so, I'm rather surprised.

Pretty much, each colony developed their own railways in multiple gauges prior to Federation in 1901. There are standard gauge railways linking all of the capitals now, but doing to created many orphan lines which have fallen into disuse.
 
If the first two colonies to build railways both standardised on 5'3'', then maybe the railways linking all the state and territory capitals would be Irish rather than English gauge. Australian rail vehicle manufacturers would be tooled for that gauge, and not English or Cape gauge. That New South Wales changed plans regarding track gauge after my home state started construction must have been an unpleasant surprise to people of the time.

Many decades later, a genial engineer called John Joe Crew Bradfield designed an electrified suburban railway network for the Sydney metropolitan area. Like all other Australian cities now with a population or over a million, Sydney has surface rail serving its C.B.D and has had it since the railways came to New South Wales. He saw that that the existing railway network could be electrified within the metropolitan area and extended underground in the most heavily developed areas, with the same railway network serving both the suburbs (except the east and inner west), mostly in cutting and on embankments, and in tunnels in the inner west, C.B.D, and eastern suburbs. This would give a user experience far better then had been seen in any of the elder global cities which were heavily developed before the railways came, these ending up with metro style rail separate from regional rail.

Apparently, he did fight for a very large loading gauge, but not a wider track gauge to match. Is it true he saw no reason to use English gauge other than interoperability with existing English gauge lines?
 
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