Hundreds of thousands of men passed through the city on their way to and from the goldfields, and within ten years more than four hundred million dollars’ worth of gold was sent into Melbourne for shipment to Europe. The town doubled and quadrupled in size. It soon reached the rank of a city, and kept growing until about 1890, when it had half a million people.
Then came a panic, which seemed for a time to be the ruin of Australia. But Melbourne was soon on its feet again and I agree with the people here who believe that their city is destined to become even greater as the Commonwealth grows.
CHAPTER XIV
THE STATE-OWNED RAILWAYS
IN MAKING the trip from Sydney to Melbourne, I was painfully reminded of the worst feature of railroading on this continent. At Albury, on the frontier between New South Wales and Victoria, I was routed out of my berth at daylight and compelled to change cars. Although the central government controls the telephone and telegraph services of Australia, the railroads are owned by the states, and since each has a different gauge for its tracks, passengers and goods must often be transferred.
The lines in Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania, which are not contiguous states, have a narrow gauge. The tracks in Victoria are five feet three inches in width, as are those of the main lines of South Australia. Only New South Wales and the Transcontinental line built by the Commonwealth government have the world standard gauge of four feet eight and one half inches. In going from Brisbane in Queensland to Perth in Western Australia one must change five times because of differing track widths, and this is one of the reasons why the thirty-five hundred mile journey takes practically six days. Such conditions cost more than time. For example, the transfer charges on freight between New South Wales and Victoria range from thirty to seventy cents a ton. Imagine what it would mean in the United States if passengers and freight had to be moved from one train to another every time a state line were crossed.
Ever since the states formed the Commonwealth there has been much discussion of the unification of these conflicting railroad gauges. This is certainly one of Australia’s greatest needs, but so far the expense has proved prohibitive. A commission of three eminent engineers, an Englishman, an Australian, and an American, recently reported that to convert all the existing lines in the Commonwealth to the standard gauge would cost about two hundred and ninety million dollars. This would mean an expenditure of more than fifty dollars for every man, woman, and child in Australia. It has also been proposed to standardize the chief routes connecting the five state capitals on the mainland at a cost of about ninety million dollars, but just now even this seems more than the country can afford. Yet the diversity of gauges imposes such a burden on Australian business that some day unification will have to come.
At present there are about twenty-six thousand miles of railways on the continent, of which twenty-three thousand miles are owned and operated by the states, twenty-eight hundred are privately owned, and the rest are in the hands of the Commonwealth government. This is about one tenth the mileage of the United States, which has approximately the same area but twenty times as many people. Most of the Australian railroads are, like the bulk of the population, on the eastern side of the continent. The great tropical Northern Territory has only one railroad, which is but two hundred miles long.
Australian railroad tracks are laid on ties cut from her forests of eucalyptus. One variety, the iron bark, is practically immune from fire, while the kauri, jarrah, and blue gum last for fifteen or twenty years.