Living in the Rail world.

I would really like to be able to offer a picture with this rant - so tomorrow I think I'll go out and sanp one. This rant is about Railway lines. More specifically about how English-Irish disputes have been Mirrored in Australia in the form of Railway lines.

Australia is a rather odd country (to all the Aussies out there, it is a compliment of sorts) but foriegners do not really seem to appreciate just how bad it is until I make remarks such as: Europe would fit into Australia... and Melbourne to Sydney is longer than Paris to London. When this latter fact is offered, some people finally begin to appreciate just how detatched we are as a nation. Now Melbourne and Sydney are very important cities in Australia (again for the locals, neither is the capital, Canberra is the capital. Melbourne WAS the capital while Canberra was being built.)

You can appreciate how useful a rail link between Melbourne and Sydney would be for a nation such as ours (and finally the various governments have realised that a rail link between Adelaide and Darwin - literally straight North-South accross the country) would be for trade. OK. There was a problem - Rail gauges. New South Wales - of which Sydney is the capital was laid out using standard gauge which was originally 4'8" but now 4'8.5" (don't ask me why) - a gauge used all over England in the 20th Century. Victoria (yep Melbourne's the capital) used Broad Gauge which is 5'3" and was used (at the time) all throughout Ireland.

So when you want a train to run through two different states, there is a BIG problem... 7 inches of problem to be precise. The original solution was to change trains at Albury-Wodonga (named after the towns either side of the border on the river Murray) but this caused obvious problems, despite making Albury, in particular, a thriving economy. The solution that has since been adopted... lay standard gauge track in Victoria! Oh wait... that would be too expensive. I know... lets lay an extra track on the Melbourne to Albury line, connect it with the Albury to Sydney line and... there we have it!

It is a pity no one considered laying fast track as they have in France for the TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse - literally Very Fast Train, 187km/hr in open air!) it may have reduced the pollution in our area from trucks using the Hume to make the Melb-Syd trek. Oh well... they say governments only think four years ahead. Pity.