AUSTRALIAN RAILWAYS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19980, 23 December 1926, Page 10

AUSTRALIAN RAILWAYS.

The judgments that are formed by experienced travellers concerning developments in the dominions are always of interest and value. In giving his impressions of Australia, gathered during his visit as a member of the Empire Parliamentary delegation, Mr Arthur Henderson has stated that his companions and he himself were surprised to find that in a country to which transport was so vital the railways lacked coordination owing to the lack of a uniformity of gauge. Whatever the respective merits of the broad and narrow railway gauges may be, it is not seriously arguable that both gauges can be advantageously adopted as part of the railway system of one country such as the Commonwealth. The division of Australia into States does not make the existing differences in the railway gauges any the less an anomaly. It is not, however, because the Australians are satisfied that the position remains as it is. For upwards of forty years the cost and inconvenience arising from diverse railway gauges have been discussed. Local and imported railway experts have unanimously agreed that the existing arrangement is a serious obstacle to national . prosperity and security, and that unification is most desirable. Some five years have now elapsed since a Federal Royal Commission reported on the subject of railway unification and recommended the institution of a uniform gauge, but nothing has been done to give effect to its conclusions. In a recent reference to the matter the Federal Treasurer seemed to imply that on Victoria rested the odium of hindering the solution of the problem. The Premier of Victoria has explained that the Government opposed the unification proposafs because the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways in that State had reported against them. But the report of this committee is itself nearly as old now as the finding of the Royal Commission. The real stumbling-block to unification would appear to be the allocation of cost. Regarding the amount of the expenditure that would he entailed in the introduction of a uniform gauge the experts have differed, and it is a significant circumstance that after each successive inquiry the estimate has increased. It is pointed out that, while the experts naturally regard the problem as national, tbe political leaders in Victoria persist in regarding- it as local. The members of the Victorian Parliamentary Committee on Railways are accused of having approached the problem in a strictly parochial spirit. On the other hand, there is probably no exaggeration in the assertion that the supreme internal problem in Australia is that arising out of the need for a unification of the gauge, and there is obvious cogency in the view that delay in dealing with this problem makes the remedy only a more intricate and costly matter for the coming generation.