Of all the torments suffered by the railway traveller in Australia none was so great as the break of gauge. At state borders, and within states, it was often impossible to complete a rail journey without changing trains when the track width changed. Western Australia and Queensland had gone for the narrow gauge, New South Wales opted for standard gauge, while Victoria went for the broad gauge. South Australia went one better: it opted for two gauges, narrow and broad. The nightmare of three different gauges, the daunting challenge of building railways across vast open spaces often with no water supplies, the follies of railway lines that were rarely used-all this is the saga of Australian railways, the sheer hard work and suffering of those who gave their life in service to the railways. Brimming with anecdotes and colorful stories, Australian Railways: Their Life and Times documents the old, the odd and the now forgotten. Complete with rare historic photographs.

"The band had played Watch on the Rhine, the sailors left behind cheered, other men waved their hats, and women cried, as the Emden pulled out of Germany's China colony of Tsingtao for the last time" Thus begins a World War I epic that was, both literally and in spirit, a world away from the trenches and slaughter of France and Belgium. Were it not all real and true, it would make wonderful fiction: the Emden survivors from the battle with the Australian cruiser Sydney sailing a leaking copra schooner from the Cocos Islands to the East Indies, the Wolf sailing undetected in Allied waters for months, the captain of the Seeadler, von Luckner, sailing a small boat halfway across the Pacific to Fiji, and then later making a dramatic escape from a New Zealand prisoner of war camp.