Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[roverdriver]

I made several references, in my story of our trip to the Red Center, to railways of varying gauges. To help Non-Ozzies to understand here is a potted history.

It was all caused by an Irishman!

When Australia consisted of several separate colonies, New South Wales, thought about building a railway. As was fairly normal at the time, they put their ides to the Colonial Office in London, and received the reply to go ahead, but to build to Standard Gauge.

Sydney (NSW) consulted with Melbourne (Victoria) and Adelaide (South Australia), and they all agreed that it was a good idea to build to the same gauge, the 'standard gauge' as proposed by NSW.

Unfortunately, the consulting engineer for Sydney was an Irishman, and to him 'standard gauge' meant the Irish gauge of 5' 3", so all three colonies started to build railways to that standard. In fact the Sydney Railway Company was formed in 1849, but the company ran into financial difficulty and was taken over by the Government. A new engineer, this time an Englishman was appointed, and he was horrified to find that the line was being built to the 5' 3" gauge. He immediately set about re-gauging it to the 'true' standard gauge of 4' 8½".

Unfortunately, in Melbourne the line had already been laid for the first train which was running by 1854. Further lines were under construction, so Victoria was locked in to the 5' 3" broad gauge, as was South Australia.
In Melbourne the various companies also struck money problems and their railways became Government owned. In fact, apart from a very few private lines, virtually all Australian railways were run by the respective colonial, and later State Governments.

Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania all opted to build lower cost railways so all adopted the narrow 3' 6" gauge. So now a situation was created with 3 different mainline gauges within the country, in five different mainland colonies. This was no real problem until late in the 1800's when some railways got close to borders, and there were possibilities of linking them up. Of course South Australia and Victoria did not have a problem, but at Albury, the Victoria/NSW border, goods had to be transhipped from standard gauge trains to broadgauge ones and vice versa.

South Australia decided that some of their more remote areas would be best served by lower-cost 3' 6" railways, so 'grafted' some of them onto the end of the broad gauge system, hence the break of gauge station at Terowie, and the line through the Flinders Ranges being narrow gauge.

I mentioned, in my story, that the NSW railways were not keen on building a line to Broken Hill. SAGR extended their narrow gauge line to Cockburn on their side of the border and the Silverton Tramway (private company) met them there from Broken Hill, so all of that ore traffic benefitted Port Pirie and not Sydney.

The Commonwealth of Australia came into being on January the 1st., 1901, and what had been separate colonies now became States within the Commonwealth. Western Australia was not too enthusiastic about joining the federation, so as a sweetener, it was offered that a railway would be built by the Commonwealth to join the West with the Eastern states. It was not until 1917 that the Trans Continental Railway was finally completed, especially as it was one of the most difficult engineering feats to cross barren waterless country. In fact along that stretch of rail is the worlds longest straight section of line- 297 miles (478 k's) without a bend.
In 1929, the Commonwealth Railways also extended the South Australian line from the Flinders Ranges, through to Alice Springs. It had been planned to go right through to Darwin, and a line was built from that city to the South but stopped after about 300 miles, leaving a huge gap in between.

Eventually NSWGR built a line to Broken Hill. It then became possible to travel from Sydney to Perth by train. One left Sydney on standard gauge to Broken Hill. Then a short trip on a horse-drawn conveyance to the Silverton Tramway station, and then continuing the journey on narrow gauge which joined the SAR metals at Cockburn (no change) through to Port Auguster. Here one changed to standard gauge again for the ride over the Nullabor Plain to Kalgoorlie. There one changed to 3' 6" again for the rest of the journey to Perth.

In 1962 a duplicated line, built to standard gauge was opened from Albury to Melbourne, so creating a standard gauge link all the way from Sydney. Other lines were gradually either changed or duplicated, so eventually 4' 8½" connected all mainland cities. It was in 1980 that a new line was finished between Port Augusta and Alice Springs, and a few years after that the long-awaited connection was made to Darwin.

In spite of those connections, most of the lines within States remain their original gauges. To enable better trans-shipment of goods, wagons have been designed capable of 'bogie exchange' so that only the bogies are changed and the wagon can continue its journey on the alternative gauge.

So you see, if it had not been for that Irishman, things would have been so very very different.

Now incidentally, if you want to see some long trains, got to the northern part of Western Australia. The various mining companies run their own railways there and it is quite normal to have trains 2 kilometers and up to 3 k's long. Fancy waiting at a level crossing for that to pass!
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Dane- roverdriver but not a Viking.

[47Jag]

Dane,

By coincidence I got this in my email today. It had a few pictures attached but they got lost in the transfer:-

Engineering that endured.

The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England,

and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jig and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular Odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So, who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

In other words, bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure,

or process, and wonder, 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.


The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important!

Now you know, Horses' Asses control almost everything.......

Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn't it?


Art

[Keith D]

Dane,

A very informative and well written description of Australian railways.

I spent a lot of my working life in the Pilbara (The mining areas of North-west Australia} and your remarks about waiting for a train to pass over a crossing struck home!

At Mount Newman in the early days, we had to start work at 7am. Just outside the mine there was a rail crossing and the first ore train of the day to Port Hedland went over the crossing at 6.55. The idea was that if you wanted to get to work on time, then you had to be early otherwise the train took about 20 minutes to pass over the crossing at initially a walking pace and then a slow running speed! That meant you lost a half hours pay!

Keith

In the nineteen seventies CRA, who owned Hamersley Iron, bought the ex-GWR locomotive "Pendennis Castle" and this was used to pull recreation trains up into the Hamersley Ranges for the enjoyment of locals. Finally in the nineties traffic density on the line had increased so much that the recreational train had to cease operations. CRA then donated the "Pendennis Castle" to the GWR society in the UK.

[Penman]

Hi
If you want to see more of the red heart and also the Ghan including some of the old route.
Try this http://tinyurl.com/qj24rke
_________________
Bristols should always come in pairs.

Any 2 from:-
Straight 6
V8 V10