Rail transport in Australia

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The railways play only a subordinate role in Australia's overall transport system . Exceptions to this are the commuter networks in the metropolitan areas in passenger traffic and the mining railways in freight traffic .

Passenger train lines in Australia
State connections Lines of the Great Southern Railway

history

Historical overview

Double hairpin in the Blue Mountains near Lithgow around 1900; today: Zig Zag Railway . It was considered that this cultural monument in the List of World Heritage of UNESCO entered.
View along the Trans-Australian Railroad

In 1854, Australia's first steam railway opened with the 3.6 kilometer long Melbourne – Sandridge line. It operated between the city center and the port of Melbourne. A year later, the 22-kilometer standard gauge line from Sydney to Parramatta was opened. Another year later, the first railroad also ran in Adelaide: It connected North Terrace with Port Adelaide over 12 kilometers . Numerous private companies as well as the emerging state railways built railway lines in the period that followed.

As early as the 1890s, every Australian colony had at least one railroad, and in the populous colonies on the east coast, lines from the hinterland to the trading ports supported the export of mining and agricultural produce. In its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, the Australian rail network stretched around 45,000 kilometers - with the rise of air and road transport in Australia, however, it shrank to just 36,000 kilometers in the early 1990s. Today it has a length of 38,445 kilometers.

Selection of important events

This section shows the history of Australian rail transport through a selection of key events:

The gauge problem

Platform of the gauge changing station Albury - longest platform in the southern hemisphere for changing between the different gauges.
The Spirit of Progress , pulled by the S301 Sir Thomas Mitchell in 1938
Puffing Billy Railway , a heritage railway in Victoria

Since before 1901, when the colonies were merged to form the Australian state , they were legally independent of each other, the decision on the gauge in which the respective railroad was to be built was a matter for the individual colony. On February 19, 1850, a law was passed in Victoria authorizing the construction of a railway from Melbourne to Port Adelaide , the port of Melbourne, in standard gauge . On July 27, 1852, New South Wales enacted law to build its railroad network in a broad gauge of 5 feet 3 inches (1600 mm). The original plan for a standard-gauge railway line between the city center and the port of Melbourne - although Victoria had been separated from New South Wales as a colony in 1851 - was therefore abandoned in favor of this decision. When New South Wales revised its decision again shortly afterwards and returned to standard gauge, Victoria was no longer able to support this decision, as railway systems had already been built in broad gauge and corresponding vehicles had been ordered. This legislative chaos has resulted in the still troublesome break in the gauges of the railway networks in Victoria and New South Wales.

In addition to these two gauges, other colonies opted for the Cape Track, which was cheaper to build . In the choice of gauge, the colonies probably largely followed their economic strength. Smaller systems also chose other narrow-gauge gauges. Overall, this led to the following result:

  • Cape gauge (1067 mm): Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, Northern Territory, South Australia (partially), Federal Railways (partially)
  • Standard gauge (1435 mm): New South Wales, Federal Railways (partially), South Australia (partially)
  • Broad gauge (1600 mm): Victoria, South Australia (partially)

As the networks grew together, this created significant operational problems. There were up to 36 lane change stations in Australia where travelers had to change trains, goods had to be reloaded or vehicles had to be rerouted.

A Royal Commission convened by the Governor General of Australia to assess the situation came to the conclusion in 1921 that “the 4 foot 8½ inch gauge should be established as the standard for Australia, with no mechanical device, third rail or other device Problems and that uniformity can only be achieved by one means, namely the re-gauging of all tracks that have a gauge other than 4 feet 8½ inches. "

For reasons of cost, this was only partially followed by three-rail tracks or gauging . The federal railway ultimately built all of its new lines in standard gauge. The first step in the Royal Commission's recommendation to standard gauge all capitals of the states on the mainland has been a reality since the 2004 extension of the Central Australian Railroad from Alice Springs to Darwin. This trend continues: in 2009, part of the once most important broad-gauge line on Victoria Railways between ( Sydney ), Albury and Melbourne , and at the same time also the formerly largest gauge changing station in Australia, Albury, was abandoned in favor of a newly built standard-gauge line.

From 2017, the entire broad-gauge network in the Murray Basin , the most important grain-growing region in Australia, is to be switched to standard gauge. At present, the grain can only be exported via the port of Geelong , as only it can be reached by broad-gauge tracks.

present

Basic facts

Trans-Australian Railway

The length of the railway network is 38,445 km (2,717 km of which are electrified):

  • 3,355 km wide gauge (1600 mm)
  • 21,674 km standard gauge (1435 mm) (of which 650 km electrified)
  • 9,539 km Cape gauge (1067 mm) (of which 2,067 km electrified)
  • 3,877 km meter gauge (1000 mm)

The private rail network - mainly iron ore transport in the Pilbara region, coal and sugar cane trains in Queensland - accounts for around 5500 km of this.

passenger traffic

Long-distance transport

The Indian Pacific in Perth

The Great Southern Railway operates three long-distance trains:

The Indian-Pacific and the Ghan are of particular importance for tourism .

Local transport

Well-developed S-Bahn networks exist in the metropolitan areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, where more than half of the continent's population lives . There are also trams in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, with the Melbourne tram network being one of the longest in the world, while Sydney and Adelaide have only a few tram lines. The metro network of the metropolis of Sydney, Metro Sydney , has been the first full-fledged metro on the continent since it opened in May 2019. The Sydney Monorail also operated in Sydney from 1988 to 2013 .

In the past, public rail transport was taken over by state institutions, but since the 1990s a large part of this sector has been privatized and henceforth organized through franchises. That is why rail traffic in the states is now being taken over by a wide variety of operators, some of which are state-owned and some are private. Most operations are basically divided into metropolitan and regional , as these areas are divided into both prerequisites (well-developed, electrified network through residential areas - thin, diesel locomotive-based network through wide country) and requirements (handling of daily commuter traffic with high cycle rates - Provision of a structural connection for the purpose of travel possibility) differ very strongly.

The most important operators are listed in the following table:

State Superordinate institution Operator Metropolitan Regional operator
New South Wales Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) Sydney Trains
formerly City Rail 		NSW TrainLink
formerly CountryLink
Victoria Public Transport Victoria (PTV) Metro Trains Melbourne (S-Bahn)
formerly Connex Melbourne
Yarra Trams (streetcar)
formerly Met Tram 		V / Line
Queensland Queensland Rail (QR) Citytrain / TransLink Traveltrain
Western Australia Public Transport Authority (PTA) Transperth
formerly the Metropolitan Transport Trust 		Transwa
formerly Westrail

Tasrail handles all rail transport in Tasmania ; Adelaide's suburban trains and trams in South Australia are operated by Adelaide Metro ; There is no public transport by rail in the Northern Territory ; and in the Australian Capital Territory , New South Wales' NSW TrainLink will de facto take over operations.

Freight transport

Pacific National

Pacific National is the largest private rail freight company in Australia. A total of around 1,000 locomotives and 10,000 freight cars are used in 100 different areas on all three gauges . At the beginning of August 2009, 23 six-axle and 132-ton AC locomotives of the 7100 series were used to transport the 12,720-ton coal trains on the Cape Gauge in Queensland.

Ore railways

Map of the heavy haulage railways in the northwest of the country.

Four heavy-duty mining railways transport iron ore to the ports in northwestern Western Australia . These railway lines are used exclusively for mining and are run as island operations .

Sugar cane railways

Sugar cane railway in Mossman, Queensland

In Queensland there are around 15 narrow-gauge railways that transport sugar cane to the processing plants.

literature

  • Frithjof Ermer, Hans-Joachim Kirsche: Australia by train. Travel guide. Verlag Bernd Neddermeyer, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-933254-67-1 .
  • Förderverein Dampf & Reise eV (editor): Fern-Express Heft 64 (special issue Australia). Röhr-Verlag, Krefeld 1999.
  • Walter G. Steingahs: 4,000 km on a 610 mm track. Or the sugar cane railways in Queensland, Australia. Verlag Feld- und Schmalspurbahnen Karl Paskarb, Celle 2002, ISBN 978-3-938278-03-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anthony Coulls, Railways as World Heritage Sites = Occasional Papers for the World Heritage Convention, ed .: International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), Paris 1999, p. 15
  2. ^ A b Australian Geographic: Railways of Australia . Poster supplement to issue 38, April-June 1995.
  3. ↑ a b The World Factbook : Australia - Railways , accessed December 25, 2013.
  4. ^ Australian Bureau of Statistics : Year Book Australia , 1967. Retrieved December 25, 2013. Quoting: “that the gauge of 4-ft. 8.5-in. be adopted as the standard for Australia; that no mechanical, third rail, or other device would meet the situation, and that uniformity could be secured by one means only, viz., by conversion of the gauges other than 4-ft. 8.5-in. "
  5. ↑ Ken Date: Broad Gauge to Albury no more . In: Railway Digest (March 2009), p. 22ff. This concerns the Albury - Seymour (Victoria) section .
  6. ^ Murray Basin gauge conversion contract awarded . June 27, 2017.
  7. ^ Murray Basin Rail Project
  8. ↑ See Pacific National website. Retrieved August 25, 2009 .
  9. ↑ Friedhelm Weidelich: First Siemens locomotives of class 7100 in Australia in action. August 19, 2009. Retrieved August 25, 2009 .