Three Rail Gauges in South Australia???

Victoria and South Australia ordered locomotives and rolling stock from various British railway engineering firms, and started some quite extensive laying of tracks. However, New South Wales decided to change to the British rail gauge of 4 ft 8 1/2 inches (1435mm), commonly known as "standard gauge" in Australia, and passed legislation to the effect that no public railway could be built within that state to any other gauge. Accordingly they changed their orders for locomotives and rolling stock to reflect the new gauge, and relaid such track as they had completed by then.

In May 1854, the first railway in Australia, using steel rails and horse drawn wagons, was opened between Goolwa, a river port on Lake Alexandrina near the mouth of the River Murray, and Port Elliot, a sea port on Encounter Bay, about 80km (50 miles) south-east of Adelaide. It was intended primarily to carry bales of wool brought down river by paddle steamer, to be loaded onto sailing vessels at Port Elliot for carriage to the markets around the world, but was also provided with two passenger cars.

Vic and SA pushed ahead with their broad gauge works, and in 1856 the first Governement-owned steam railway in Australia was opened between Adelaide and Port Adelaide, a distance of about 8 miles. The rail network around Adelaide was soon built up and then extended to the country areas, and on Jan 1, 1885, the broad gauge line reached the Victorian border to link up with the broad gauge rail network in that state.

Against the advice of their own railway engineers, the SA government decided to build light-weight railways in isolated areas to the 3 ft 6 inch (1067mm) gauge, commonly called the "narrow gauge". Because everything associated with this gauge was made to a smaller scale, it achieved great savings in initial cost, although it meant a slower service. But these lower initial costs were more than offset by the additional handling required when the narrow gauge lines met up with the broad gauge network, and goods and passengers had to be transferred from one train to another, often in the dead of night.

During this time, Tasmania, Western Australia and Queensland also decided to build their railways to the narrow gauge, because of the lower costs.

So by the time of Federation (1 Jan, 1901) the situation was that no adjoining states had the same gauge, except for Vic and SA. On the other hand SA had two different gauges coming together at a number of points. Additionally South Australia's main railway workshop was situated near Adelaide, in the heart of the broad gauge network; any major repairs to narrow gauge locomotives or rolling stock meant they had to be carried to and from the workshops on specially built broad gauge wagons. What a confusion!

During the 1914-1918 war, the Federal government saw the benefits of linking up all the states of Australia with a common rail network, and in spite of the shortage of manpower they built a line between Port Augusta in SA to Kalgoorlie in WA, across some thousands of miles of desert country. This line is notable in two respects:

1.	It was completed within the allotted budget and time frames, in spite of having been commenced during wartime.
2.	It has the longest stretch of absolutely straight track in the world, 487km (297 miles).

But for some reason, probably political, the Powers-that-be chose to build it in the standard gauge as was used in NSW only, although at the time the only direct connection with that state's rail network was via a narrow gauge track between Port Pirie and Broken Hill.

At Port Augusta in SA and at Kalgoorlie in WA, this Trans-Continental line, as it became known, connected with narrow gauge networks. In WA, the narrow gauge continued into the capital, Perth. However in SA, the narrow gauge track led to another "break-of-gauge" station, where the broad gauge network would take the passenger or goods into Adelaide. Madness indeed!

Ultimately the standard gauge network took over many of the narrow gauge tracks until today the only remaining narrow gauge lines are the busy ones on Eyre Peninsula, west of Adelaide, linking Port Lincoln with the adjacent wheat growing area, and two tourist lines, one at "Steam Town" Peterborough (which may be about to close due to the increasing Public Liability Insurance burden), and the other being the famed Pitchi Ritchi Tourist Railway, both in the lower north of the state.

Much of SA's country broad gauge network has been "standardized", including the line between Adelaide and Melbourne, and other sections have been paralleled by standard gauge tracks, so now all capital cities on mainland Australia are linked by a standard gauge rail network.

Many sections of Adelaide's inner metropolitan rail network have been rebuilt as dual gauge, catering for both broad and standard gauge interstate and country freight or passenger traffic, as well as the broad gauge suburban services.

When the gauge mix-up was at its peak, there were several country centres with broad and narrow gauge tracks brought either side of a loading platform to facilitate transfer of passengers and goods. For convenience, some tracks were laid with three rails, to allow them to carry trains of either gauge.

A few country centres had all three gauges in use, and some of the tracks were laid with four rails to accommodate all three gauges. These have since been dismantled and what tracks remain are either standard or broad gauge, with a few places still laid in dual standard/broad gauge.

A later system of transferring between the broad and standard gauge tracks was to exchange the "bogeys" or 4 wheel trucks under the freight wagons. While this was more convenient than unloading the freight and reloading into cars on adjacent track, it was still cumbersome. It was said that a train of fifty or so wagons could be converted from one gauge to the other in as little as five or six hours!

But nowadays the standard gauge tracks have been extended to connect all the mainland state capitals, with the tracks due to open to Darwin in January 2004. And when the bridge over Bass Strait is completed, the standard gauge may be extended to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania... sorry, just joking, folks ;-)

However some of the dual and triple gauge trackwork has been recreated at the National Railway Museum at Port Adelaide, which has the distinction of being on the site of the terminus of the original Adelaide to Port Adelaide line of 1856.

So much track has had to be built, to facilitate the movement of stock within the museum, that the Museum now possesses the longest length of operating triple gauge track that has ever existed anywhere in the world!

The following diagram shows two of the arrangements of triple gauge track that were commonly used; both of these arrangements appear at the museum.

The upper view shows the layout generally employed for the triple gauge track, known as a "gauntlet" arrangement. The comparatively wide spacing between the rails allows for reasonably convenient construction of switches, with ample room for the movable blades and the crossovers. The lower view shows the "single common rail" setup, used when the track must be run past a high level loading platform. It keeps the spacing between the cars and the platform to a minimum for cars on all gauges. However the very narrow space, about 3-1/2 inches or 90mm, between the broad and standard gauge rails necessitates greater complications in the construction of switches. Between the two layouts is a diagram to illustrate the transition section used to change from one format to the other. After a lot of sorting of parts we assembled it to look like this. Note the use of "fixed points" that automatically switch the wheels of the different gauge rolling stock to the correct rail, aided by the check rails.