Quote:
Originally Posted by Aliantha
About railroad privatization, we had the same trouble in Australia with different guage tracks. I'm not sure, but I think this is still an issue or was until quite recently (last 30 yrs or so).
The problem was that the different guages weren't because of privatization though. It was the different state governments causing the problems.
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For privatisation in Australia, ditto pretty much everything Dana said about it in Britain.
For our rail gauges, at the moment of Federation in 1901,
every state in Australia had rail gauges incompatible with any state it had a border with.
Different Colonial governments talking more to London than each other, vested business interests in each state and general stupidity are to blame.
It took
90 years for the federal Government to "herd the cats". In the meantime we found it was easiest to build a machine that could remove and replace the bogeys on a railcar
while it was still moving.