“We used to buy most of our rolling stock from England, but now, as in the other Australian states, our locomotives and cars are built at the state railway shops. Our shops are at Ipswich, which is close to big coal deposits. We buy steel rails from the steel mills at Newcastle, and about the only equipment we now get from abroad are patented devices and specialties.”
I may add that not all those to whom I have talked are so favourable in their reports on the state-owned railways. One man reminded me that in most cases these lines, operated in the interests of the people, charge as high freight and passenger rates as do our privately owned roads in the States. Another calls attention to the fact that sometimes for four years running the Australian lines have shown considerable losses and capital is by no means always certain of the four per cent. dividend it has a right to expect from them.
One thing that strikes one about the Australian locomotives and passenger and freight cars is the fact that they are much lighter than those to which we are accustomed. The freight cars seem particularly small and light. In my trips over the country I have passed hundreds of slat-sided cars transporting livestock. The sheep cars are double-deckers. The Australian wheat goes to market in open-top cars, instead of in box cars, as with us, and is handled in sacks instead of in bulk. The wheat export amounts to one hundred million bushels a year, and most of it is shipped overseas in bags. I have seen enormous stacks of full wheat bags along the railways and at the ports. As the grain is harvested in the dry season, there is no danger of its fermentation when bagged and stacked in this way. Neither is there much risk of its getting wet, for it is often covered with tarpaulin, both in the stacks awaiting shipment and on the cars. There is, however, considerable loss every year from rats and other vermin. Since she got her grain elevators at Sydney, New South Wales has been building special grain cars for handling wheat in bulk.
The ties for Australia’s railroads are furnished by her eucalyptus forests, many of which contain splendid timber. The Tasmanian blue gum, a species of eucalyptus, is one of the most durable of woods. It has twice the strength of English oak and, used as railroad ties or paving blocks, in the Tasmanian climate it has a life of from fifteen to twenty years. In the dry air of Victoria blue gum sleepers last twice as long. The jarrah, a eucalyptus of Western Australia, has been known to withstand fire better than iron girders. This wood is one of the few that will resist the white ants, and seaborers make no impression upon it. I have heard that jarrah piles driven at Port Adelaide in 1868 showed no signs of decay forty-two years later. Karri is another remarkably durable eucalyptus of Western Australia much used for ties. Karri planks from ships dismantled after thirty years of service have been sawed up to make paving blocks, and a log of this wood that had lain forty-six years in mud below high-water mark was reported “perfectly sound” by a government expert.
One of the biggest railroad undertakings of modern times was building the Australian Transcontinental line for a thousand miles across the desert. Until this was completed Western Australia was cut off from her sister states by a great waste of sand and could communicate with them only by telegraph or by sea. The ocean journey from Perth to Sydney took seven days. Neither Western Australia nor her neighbour, South Australia, felt able to finance an unprofitable railroad joining them together. So it became the job of the Commonwealth government, which began the line in 1912 and completed it five years later.
The overland journey from Adelaide, South Australia, to Perth on the coast of Western Australia used to take two months. By train it now takes two days. Besides decreasing the time between Western Australia and New Zealand or America, the railroad shortens the trip from London to Melbourne or Sydney by almost a week.
Preparing the road-bed and laying the track across the level stretches of the desert were easy matters. The real problem was providing water and supplies for the two construction gangs as they worked toward each other across the hot and arid wastes, unwatered and uninhabited save by hordes of flies and mosquitoes. Four hundred and twenty-five miles west of Port Augusta the railroad enters the Nullarbor Plain, a vast empty limestone plateau on which there is not a single water hole. Here it runs in a bee line for three hundred and thirty miles—the longest straight stretch of track in the world. The rest of the route is through sandhill country where there are at intervals natural rock catchment basins for water. Although this region is called a desert, there is an annual rainfall of from two to five inches, and this was caught in great roofed-over reservoirs and saved for the use of the workers.
For some time the question of water supply on the Nullarbor Plain threatened to hold up indefinitely the construction of the Transcontinental. Then a message came from Kalgoorlie telling the good news that water had been found on, or rather under, the plain. The engineer in charge wired that he had pumped out seventy thousand gallons from an artesian bore about three hundred miles east of Kalgoorlie. Another bore, one hundred miles farther east, struck brackish water usable for locomotives. These two wells now furnish water sufficient not only for the railroad but for limited irrigation and pastoral purposes besides. There are tanks every fifty miles across the plain, connected by a pipe line from the Kalgoorlie reservoir.
While the Transcontinental was being built, and before the pipe and the tanks were constructed, water for two hundred horses, three hundred camels, and twelve hundred workmen had to be brought by cars and on camel-back. At one time it was carried three hundred miles by tank cars and thirty miles by camels to the eastern end of steel at a cost of thirty-nine dollars for each thousand gallons. To supply the western railhead, water was piped for three hundred and fifty miles to a big reservoir and then hauled two hundred and twenty miles to the construction camps.
Without the aid of camels it is probable that the Transcontinental never could have been built. The “ships of the desert” took the engineers on the preliminary survey of the line, they bore the men who went along the route looking for wells and water holes, and later on they were the indispensable carriers of water and construction materials over miles of waste land and through months of overpowering heat.