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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.
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