Why You Couldn't Take One Train Across Australia

Until 1962 no train ran through to Melbourne

Until 1962, no passenger train ran straight through from Sydney to Melbourne. The rails were different widths, and every traveller changed trains at the border, often at night.

Three widths of track, laid by colonies that were meant to agree.

A gauge is the width between the rails

A rail gauge is the distance between the inside edges of the two rails. Wheels are built to one gauge. A wagon from one gauge cannot run on another.

“routed out of their snug beds by lantern-light in the morning”

Following the Equator, ch. XIV

Australia uses three. Standard gauge, 1,435 millimetres. Broad gauge, 1,600 millimetres. And narrow gauge, 1,067 millimetres. In the old measures: four feet eight and a half inches, five feet three, and three feet six.

Today, a train can run between the mainland capitals on one gauge. Getting there took about a hundred and fifty years. The trouble began with a handful of letters in the 1840s and 1850s.

An Irish engineer chose the Irish gauge

In 1848, Britain's Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, advised the Governor of New South Wales to use one gauge across the colonies. His choice was the British standard, four feet eight and a half.

Letters between London and Sydney went by ship, and took months each way. A question and its answer could take the better part of a year. Decisions on the ground moved faster than decisions in London.

In Sydney, the Sydney Railway Company was planning a line to Parramatta. In 1849 it hired an Irish engineer, Francis Webb Sheilds, as chief engineer.

Sheilds knew Irish railways. In 1850 he persuaded the company to choose the Irish gauge of five feet three. The colony passed the request to London.

Then the money ran short. Late in 1850 the company cut salaries, and Sheilds resigned with three of his staff. His gauge stayed. London agreed to it in 1851, and in July 1852 New South Wales made it law.

The company's next chief engineer, James Wallace, arrived from Britain in 1852. Within weeks, he recommended the British standard. In January 1853, the government told the company the five foot three law would be repealed. New South Wales had changed its mind.

Melbourne's broad gauge order had sailed

Victoria had separated from New South Wales in 1851. In February 1853, Sydney sent a memo south, saying it was switching to standard gauge.

Timing mattered. The Melbourne and Hobson's Bay Railway Company was waiting to send its order for locomotives and carriages to England by ship. In early April 1853, Victoria's government said it would stay with five feet three. Days later, the order sailed.

In July 1853, Victoria told New South Wales it would keep the broad gauge. It even asked London to make Sydney reverse.

On 12 September 1854, Australia's first steam railway opened in Melbourne. About four kilometres, from Flinders Street to Sandridge, on broad gauge.

On 26 September 1855, Sydney's first line opened to Parramatta Junction, on standard gauge. In 1856, South Australia opened its first steam railway, from Adelaide to Port Adelaide. Like Victoria, it used broad gauge.

The gap could still have been closed cheaply. In 1857, the New South Wales engineer John Whitton proposed converting Sydney's line to broad gauge. There were only a few dozen kilometres of track and a handful of engines. The proposal went nowhere.

Whitton went on to build the New South Wales network on standard gauge instead. By 1889, the colony had more than 3,000 kilometres of it.

Queensland built a cheaper narrow gauge

Then a third width arrived. In 1865, Queensland opened its first line, from Ipswich to Grandchester, on three feet six. It was one of the first main lines anywhere built to a narrow gauge.

The reason was cost. Narrow track was cheaper and quicker to build, and it could take tighter curves through hills. For a young colony with a long coast and little money, that mattered more than matching its neighbours.

South Australia chose it too, from 1867, to build new lines more cheaply. So South Australia ended up running two gauges inside one colony.

Western Australia opened its first government line in 1879, from Geraldton to Northampton, also on three feet six. Tasmania opened on broad gauge in 1871, then converted to narrow in 1888.

For decades, none of this mattered much. Each colony's railway ran inland from its own ports. Between colonies, goods mostly went by sea, and borders had customs posts.

The Sydney and Melbourne lines met at Albury

In June 1883, the Sydney line and the Melbourne line met at Albury, on the Murray River. Two gauges, one station.

Albury was given a platform about 455 metres long, one of the longest in Australia. Passengers walked from one train to the other. Freight was unloaded from one set of wagons and reloaded into another.

In 1895, the writer Mark Twain changed trains there. He wrote: "Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth." One reason he was given was jealousy between the colonies.

Twain called the Sydney track the narrow one. It was the standard gauge, narrow only beside Victoria's broad.

In 1888, the Sydney line reached Queensland at Wallangarra. The station sat on the border, with one platform face for each gauge.

In South Australia, the broad gauge from Adelaide stopped at Terowie in 1880, and narrow gauge ran on north. Nearby Peterborough would later handle all three gauges in one yard.

A popular story says the gauges were chosen to slow down an invading army. The record does not support it. The choices came from engineers, costs and timing. Military complaints came later, in an 1889 report and again from Lord Kitchener two decades on.

When the colonies federated in 1901, the customs posts went. The breaks of gauge stayed.

A standard gauge line crossed the desert

The new Commonwealth built a line to Western Australia. Work began at Port Augusta in September 1912. The two halves met at Ooldea on 17 October 1917.

The Trans-Australian Railway runs nearly 1,700 kilometres. It includes 478 kilometres of dead straight track across the Nullarbor Plain.

It was standard gauge. But at both ends it met narrow gauge lines. So the new railway created new breaks of gauge: at Kalgoorlie in the west, and at Port Augusta in the east.

A traveller from Brisbane to Perth had to change gauge several times along the way. The national railway had become a chain of transfer stations.

In 1921, a Royal Commission recommended standard gauge for the nation. Inventors kept proposing devices to get around the problem. None was adopted.

In November 1921, the Prime Minister and the state Premiers agreed to adopt standard gauge. Agreeing was quick. Paying for it took about another forty years.

In March 1942, General Douglas MacArthur changed trains at Terowie. There, at a break of gauge, he told reporters he would return to the Philippines.

The network was joined line by line

The fix came line by line. In 1930, standard gauge reached Brisbane from the south, via Kyogle.

In 1945, the Clapp Report costed a national conversion. In 1956, a committee in Canberra picked three trunk lines to start with. Albury to Melbourne was first.

In January 1962, the first freight train ran on new standard gauge track from Albury to Melbourne. Through passenger trains followed in April. In its first full year, the line carried more than a million tons of freight.

In Western Australia, a new standard gauge line from Kalgoorlie carried its first freight to Perth in 1968. Passenger trains followed in 1969.

The link from Broken Hill to Port Pirie came next. On 23 February 1970, the first Indian Pacific left Sydney for Perth. 4,352 kilometres, with no change of gauge.

In 1980, a new standard gauge line was finished from Tarcoola to Alice Springs, about 830 kilometres long. It replaced a flood-prone narrow gauge line through the Centre.

Adelaide itself was still broad gauge. In 1982, a standard gauge line into the city opened at last.

In 1995, the line from Melbourne to Adelaide was converted to standard gauge. For the first time, the mainland state capitals were linked on one gauge.

In 2004, the 1,420 kilometre line from Alice Springs to Darwin opened. The north coast was joined too.

Australia still runs three gauges

Yet Australia still has three gauges. In December 2024, there were about 31,200 kilometres of operating heavy railway.

About 56 per cent is standard gauge. About 35 per cent is narrow, most of it in Queensland and Western Australia. About eight per cent is broad, nearly all in Victoria.

Queensland's network is still built around three feet six. Victoria's regional lines are still largely five feet three. Where two gauges share a corridor, some track carries a third rail, so trains of both widths can use it.

One South Australian line, to Mount Gambier, was converted from narrow to broad in the 1950s. It was meant to become standard later. It closed in 1995, still broad.

Even now, the work goes on. Around 2010, about 200 kilometres of the line north of Seymour were converted from broad to standard.

It began with a few letters by ship

The first decision took a few letters, carried by ship. Undoing it took a Royal Commission, decades of committees, and more than a century of work.

On a railway, the first few kilometres decide the next hundred years.