The Roaring 20s?
I was giving some more thought to how the good old days of Australian rail never were, or at least were so long ago that no-one alive today would remember them.
Like most degenerative diseases, the malaises that have affected Australian rail over our lifetimes, were present long before they become evident, and long before they ended up nearly killing the host.
I’ve been down this track before so I was going to look at specific trends in rail, and open discussion on these topics.
In previous posts here and elsewhere I’ve suggested that the legacy rail network, particularly in SE Australia, had its last serious bout of investment in the 1920s.
However we would be foolish to regard even this round as a proactive investment in Australia’s development. On the contrary, I would suggest it was reactive, in other words, the “body” of Australian rail politics had already had the ‘disease’ at the point when the first radical cures were being tested.
Economic advantage over the competition
Even the lightest laid, most insubstantial railways in Australia, be they the cane tramways or the pioneer branchlines of the larger gauges, had a capacity and transit time advantage over the nearest competition, namely horse-drawn wagons.
Along the coast, however, the advantage was less clear, as shipping could at least manage to hold its own in terms of carrying capacity, and was not far behind on transit times (an analogy for the situation today vis a vis road and rail?).
Hence the coastal rail networks were the last to be developed, with 3 conspicuous examples: A connection from the eastern states to Perth, contiguous rail to Cairns, and the coastal line from Melbourne to Sydney (never finished) and Sydney to Brisbane (only completed in 1930).
I should also mention the Murray River riverboat network, if only to mention it played a valuable role in establishing the idea of rural development and the development of agricultural commodities as opposed to merely agriculture for home consumption. However, the network was not extensive, was indirect and not very reliable.
For all the talk of nation building and the importance of a national rail network, I suspect economics drove this.
Back to the horse-drawn vehicles: A manifold improvement in productivity from rail haulage was evident from the first railway being built, and for established or viable settlements it made sense to pay for rail haulage or passage, no matter how high the fixed costs of the rail system. Rail systems were incredibly capital intensive and somewhat labour intensive as well, however, to run the same system, even if it were possible, using horses would have been much more intensive in both (if you regard horses as capital).
In this first phase, rail as a development option was really against the opportunity cost of not developing country at all. While a grazier might be able to graze extensively, or a quite specific mining project, say gold or copper, might be able to smelt on site and lift small amounts of finished product out by horse, the options for development and settlement of distant inland settlements were few without rail.
Given the opportunity cost of rail was undeveloped country, this could easily skew arguments towards rail development. And away from developing the rail well, given that even a poor quality line would make a significant difference to the economic prospects of fertile country.
However, by the 1920s, even a rudimentary motor vehicle-based alternative would be a real threat. Here, the economic advantage came not from capacity or transit time (roads were still poor), but from the blind-spots of rail: inflexibility of rail, and high fixed costs.
If anything, arguably, motor vehicles profited from the opposite characteristics of those that made rail great. Rail could carry a few hundred tonnes at a time, even on the lowest quality routes; rarely was that capacity needed in Australia except during harvests, and even then. Yet customers and later taxpayers were paying for that fixed, very high capacity the routes had. Transit time might be better, but gate-to-gate or gate-to-ship times might be better, simply for the lack of waiting and handling.
If you stand in the souvenir shop at Puffing Billy’s Belgrave Station, you will see something that gives much of the game away. A comment on a photograph from the heydey of narrow gauge shows the old goods shed at Belgrave. It notes that little freight was in fact shipped through Belgrave, even at the start. It just wasn’t worth unloading it from horse or truck onto a narrow gauge train for a few km, then transhipping to the broad gauge. Much easier to get the horse or truck down the hill to Fern Tree Gully, even if this had a longer transit time.
This would be the tale of much of Australian rail even by the 1920s.
I recall reading in the passenger market it was similar. The Newcastle Express was introduced in the 1920s to combat the same problem, with some effort put into reducing the journey time which had not been a priority before. The road journey was still 4 hours versus 2.5 on the train. However was this the real journey time? The train might be reliable and fast but how frequent compared with a car you drive yourself, and could leave anytime; or a bus that might need only 20 passengers to be a viable run?
It follows as well that as the road journey time decreased, you would expect efforts made to improve the rail time as well. This did not occur, and the time is approximately the same today, despite vast sums spent on electrification, concrete sleepering and heavier rail.
Despite Australia having a somewhat impressive growth rate since the start of Australian rail, in practice it was nowhere near enough to soak up all the excess capacity of the rail system where it ran. And the question of spending recurrent resources maintaining this capacity, rather than a simultaneous rationalising and improvement, has dogged Australian rail since that time.
Technology
This flowed through into the technological choices. Assuming abundant capital and a viable market, one would assume Australia would at least be in the middle of the pack of technological innovation. And where the returns from innovation were high, in cases where Australia’s situation was special, you would expect to see Australia at the front. Situations like remoteness, like high temperatures, or low water availability, long distances to depots, and so on.
So it is a surprise to see it took an American to come in to shake up the South Australian Railways out of their Britishness, and that the neighbouring systems paid scant attention to what he was doing, though the lessons were much the same for them.
Physical token-based safeworking would be the first bizarre import from the UK that should not have persisted past the development of an alternative. Of course there were doubts about telegraphic and virtual systems such as train orders; why these weren’t traded off against the clear savings from significantly less staff and capital, and more flexibility, is not clear. Too many ‘purists’ with a UK history of safeworking I suspect.
Electrification on the DC system was also a technology just starting to come into its own when two Australian cities grasped it. It wasn’t actually a brand new technology, given trams and interurbans had been using a lighter version of the technology for some time. In fact, when Doncaster had Australia’s first electric tramway, it preceded Melbourne heavy rail efforts by decades.
This was a truly expensive technology, though it also realised significant benefits in crewing and servicing costs of locomotives. Especially in the busier or steeper parts of the system where steam costs were high. It is puzzling why, given these advantages, it wasn’t more widely used, especially before the advent of heavier haul diesel locomotives. I would guess the recurrent costs of the less profitable and more sparsely used parts of the system were diverting capital from what could have been a good system on the major routes.
Referring to the Newcastle Express above, one could imagine a lighter, faster and more sprightly electric service that could have been built in the 1920s, using similar car bodies as the suburban system but fitted out to a higher standard. Such cars could have put on the power on the grades the locomotives found tough, such as Cowan Bank, Hawkmount, and the Hornsby climb, and might have been cleared for faster running around curves. That alone would have cut some time from the timetable of the day, before any consideration was given to rerouting the corridor.
While internal combustion locomotion was still in its early days, railmotors had started appearing around the country on passenger traffic, most conspicuously through the Brills, CPH and PERM (later DERM).
Again, this should have been seen as a canary dozing off in the coalmine, as steam-hauled passenger trains were obviously quite unviable by the 1920s on all but the major routes. If a complete train of passenger cars could be replaced by a single self-propelled carriage, this was clearly pointing to the unviability of passenger traffic in rural areas on the whole. Now I don’t mean could they fill a train, as there will still large numbers of well patronised mail and day express trains on the major routes. I mean could they fill a train at an adequate rate of return, and to every nook and cranny of the system.
Oddly enough, some of these railmotors also started appearing on outer suburban routes, such was their lower cost, their convenience, and the actual traffic on offer. It is a wonder such vehicles weren’t considered for the marginal outer suburban lines of the day, like Lilydale, Hurstbridge, or the North Shore. As I understand it, they did actually see service to East Hills, Carlingford and the Sefton route.
If the 1850s revealled the promise of opening up the country with conveying heavy loads in reasonable times, the 1920s heralded the need for economy, the productivity curve tapering off massively.
Industrial Relations
The Australian Settlement, taken from the point of the Harvester Judgement, was a bit over a decade old at this point. In return for paying a fair wage, businesses exposed to import competition would be protected by tariffs. As this would hurt the domestic and export sectors, agriculture would be supported through marketing boards and export facilitation. Large numbers of monopolies were under government control, from water and electricity to the railways.
In the Anglosphere this was not yet the norm. The heydey of the private railway groups in the UK was coming upon them, while major railroad groups were forming in the US. Those nations too, apart from some cherry picking in specific industries like ship building, tended to less government intervention.
Given the explicit development objectives of Australian governments, it is not surprising that Australian rail operations had fallen so completely under government by this point. While the objective of maintaining the rail enterprise as a whole as a profitable or at least cost-neutral endeavour remained, differentials of profitability within the enterprise remained.
Fare and freight rates books tended to be fairly even by distance, even when the costs of delivery changed markedly according to what was actually involved. Hence a distant branchline that was costly to serve might not cost much more to the customer than a more easily served mainline destination closer to capital or port. And certain traffics might be advantaged to customer; never to the railway.
Little pressure was brought to bear on the enterprise therefore to actually become more efficient. And with road transport bearing upon them, orders of magnitude of efficiency would be required. Technology, as explained above, could help. But at the end of the day, leadership and management were lacking when they were needed most.
A railway of steam locomotive-hauled passenger trains using staff and tickets, substantial staffed stations and could have been quickly transformed into a system of EMUs and railmotors, using simplified signalling and unstaffed halts with onboard or agency ticketing. The 1920s would have been the right time to have done it.
Conclusion
I’ve long been a believer the rot started long ago, and so long ago that we can scarcely recognise the cause; few around today would have seen the world where it was not the case.
Whether your fond memories were 1960s steam, 1970s branchlines, 1980s mainline express trains or even 1990s vestigal suburban trains that have now passed from use, what you were seeing was the dregs, the tail end of a system that started dying before most of us were born.
It would be hard to make meaningful second guessing of decisions taken in the 1850s or 1880s, the world was still a very different place then. By the 1920s, however, enough of the modern world was visible for informed descendents to judge how effective contemporary decision making was.
With the advent of road transport, rail would no longer be unchallenged on most passenger and freight tasks. Technology was moving to improve rail incrementally; but the capital was not able to be raised; and the will not summoned to divert funds from those parts of the network that could not be saved, to those that could.
What had confronted the 1850s and 1880s decision maker as a clear advantage to rail; the same day journey or the same week goods haul, would soon not be enough. Days would turn to hours and rail would lose massively.
What survives from the 1920s? Suburban electrification in Melbourne and Sydney provided an asset that could be drawn down for the next several decades; only now are realising its limitations. Train order working and a big locomotive and rolling stock policy did not really leave South Australia until the 1950s and 60s, so I’m not sure it was a success. Branchline railmotors did at least point the way to the least cost way of carrying country and interurban passengers, with Vline’s Velocities the descendents of generations of rail motors, arguably the way it should always have been.
Never really thought of it like that but you’re right, there isn’t that many coastal railways in Australia. Even less that actually run near a coast!
Thanks Somebody.
There were vague plans to link Orbost with Nowra, which would be an interesting line to ride today if it was there. Cairns to Brisbane was a later comer as was Brisbane to Sydney via the Coast. Rail never got further north than Geraldton along the coast (though there were lines further north).
Port Lincoln was never made contiguous though it was never very far from the edge at Buckleboo to the private narrow gauge network at Whyalla. Mt Gambier was linked to Adelaide, but the line did not link the coastal communities directly at Beachport, Kingston SE and Robe.
I suspect by the 1920s it was becoming clear that if a railway had not been built already to a coastal town, it would not be needed. After all, it would already have been linked by ship; and road was on its way.
Actually it is not too hard to second guess the motives for different alignments in the C19. Just as different lobby groups today use congestion and lack of connection to politically motivate government investment in freeways and more importantly acquisition of land, so too back then.
Ever was ts thus, and there were none of those pesky members registers for politicians to worry so much about accountability and impartiality.
Definitely true aussiemandias. Question is, why did some of this thinking survive into the 1920s, when the motor vehicle was already proving a useful alternative?
And more fundamentally, why did Australia not turn into the USA, with the hundreds of millions of people who might have justified a rail network as large as the one we had? Obviously the inland areas weren’t fertile, but I doubt that’s the whole story; the cities didn’t really grow, nor did the fertile coastal strips get fully developed. I think THAT’s the real story of why the 1800s promise was never fulfilled.
My father was born in the Scottish Border regions. The line in which he departed the town he was born in was a late Beeching closure. As I am proof that an interest in trains is a genetic disorder, I got hima book on the closed lines of the Borders, as it has a picture of the station he last saw as a 5 year old.
Looking through that, I realised that I may as well ahve been looking at a station somewhere on the Bendigo line. And I got to thinking, and I got to thinking where it was that we reached the starting point where Australia’s rail system disintegrated. And I realised it was the fact that the designers thought they could duplicate the UK, and ignore the US in the 1860’s. Whitton might have built pretty viaducts, but we needed someone who could build spindly, but strong, trestles.
And I got to thinking when the cancer of thinking that we were the UK finally took the last vestiges of life from the railways to the propped-up zombie that we see now.
And it was the period after the First World War – the 1920’s.
I think the Commissioners knew that they couldn’t keep on supporting railways that could not be justified, and keep being pilloried for wasting taxpayers’ money on said railways.
But while there was still breath in the Upper Kumbuckta West-Lower Speewa Railway Leagues and votes to be had in gerrymandered rural electorates*, then pressure, despite the VR always objecting to the costs in every submission made, still went ahead with extension after extension despite the railways knowing where the money was needed.
It was also used as a generalist employer – bear in mind that a lot of the decision makers survived the 1890’s Depression, and I wonder how much that played on the minds of the powers that were at that stage as to the need to ensure that overstaffing continued?
I’d go as far as saying that if it was not for the Depression, the state railways would have kept on their path of over-expansion.
I’ll use the VR, as I know it better than any of the other systems.
The Border Railways Act was passed in 1923. And you have to ask yourself for what purpose was it done? The only line that had any potential in NSW from Victoria aside from connections to larger towns like Tocumwal and Albury (which was to Deniliquin) was already opened and had been run for several years by a private company.
The last of the infill lines in Victoria, to such important places as Red Hill and Alvie were quite early into their lives being served by road freight transport. Red Hill is a classic example; the VR ran a trucking service competing against its own line. Yet it remained there, still requiring money dropped into it, until the 1950s.
What is interesting is that it seemed that the state systems were quite afraid of the United States – few, if any, locomotives were built by Baldwin than previously, and the bits we did copy of the US practice were built by British companies using British parts – from the overseas built 500 classes to a British signalling company supplying the autmoated signalling (McKenzie and Holland).
*That’d be something else to do – how much did the fact that state parliaments were weighted toward rural electorates have to do with the over-expansion of the system?
Thanks Notch. You and me both got rellies from the Scottish Borders, mine at the Berwick on Tweed end.
Very true that the US development model would have suited us better than the UK one. Particularly how in the US some of the lines were very ‘pioneer’ in the 1860s while by the 1920s they were very much modern main lines with heavy steam and bogie rolling stock, multi-track on the major routes and signalling starting to get sensible. And that was with capital that could be raised on the market.
I’ve read how a lot of our thinking on the Industrial Revolution got it all wrong – first that it started much earlier than the invention of steam, but with the invention of the first factories, workhouses that didn’t necessarily have externally driven machines in them, maybe just small looms or workbenches, but concentrated the workforce together. This was in the early 1700s, not the late. And the use of canal boats from that time.
And it was like waves on the shore, when the 1780-1800 wave hit with the first primitive Bolton and Watt machines, the increase in productivity was so massive that it really did cause a wave of rural depopulation and urban development – a bit like China is going through now. But here’s the frightening bit. This wave was so high that it was never again really matched by any subsequent wave of productivity.
So basically you had a generation of peasant farmers and their children drawn to the city (and cleared off their lands in many cases) who came in to work in the first generation of steam powered machine driven factories, producing a massive new wave of goods – but once that wave had worked itself into the system, subsequent waves of capital equipment were considerably more efficient (and I’m sure, Notch, you know your histories of steam reciprocation, condensing, and all the other innovations that made steam engines more efficient), and therefore didn’t require all this labour.
And then you had vast numbers of abandoned factories, unemployed urban workers who were unable to simply return to the peasant farming they had done before. More output being produced with less input.
And with capital highly mobile, it wasn’t long before much of that capital was already off to the US, to Hong Kong, to India or wherever else it could be done cheaper.
Those agricultural railways, like the UK branchlines you’ve read about, where already being built for a rural lifestyle that was disappearing before their eyes. The economic ‘terms of trade’ in the UK were already shifting away from agriculture.
Of course the railways between the big cities were a sure bet, and still are, but not the railways to the small agricultural communities. A bit of ‘noblesse oblige’ with the railways being a small concession to the agricultural world in the UK being left behind.
I don’t think any part of the world was able to get their C19th rail investment ‘right’ given the rate of change people had already experienced, it was perhaps impossible to know just how much more productivity could be squeezed out of the economy from continued investment. However, by the turn of the century, it beggars belief that the poor performers even then couldn’t have been abandoned without compromising the profitability of the survivors.
Your comment about bizarre grab for Stony Crossing is apt. They were spending vast amounts of political capital trying to serve communities in another state, for no local voting benefit, no net increase to the bottom line either. What was it about? This is like the Railpage dribbling about Velocities running to Wagga. Even if it was true, what benefit would it be. There is a passenger train running twice a day already from Melbourne to Wagga. If there was a crisis of excess demand from fare paying passengers on this route, I’d know about it.
And anyway, even if there was demand from fare payers on this route, I’d expect to see the ‘train’ rolling down runway 16/34 with twin props spinning.
The US experienced something similar post WWII – the black migration from the south to northern cities was them leaving agricultural jobs in search of industrial jobs that were already evaporating in the urban core. Which makes me wonder about China’s mass urbanisation – how long will manufacturing remain labour-intensive there?
Thanks James. It reminds me how economic booms are so transitory and the social ‘wave’ that follows the economic one often ends in tears.
People talk about whether Autralia ‘might’ get the Dutch disease. This is ridiculous, it has had it for a while. There is no way the AUD should be 0.9 USD given the actual state of the Australian economy, except for the extraction and sale of dirt and rocks.
How is the rest of the economy supposed to manage?
Anyway these booms like mining with short-term benefits distort long term decision making. And I don’t just mean price booms like exports or property, I mean technology booms, population and immigration booms and so on. Society at first underreacts but then overreacts.
So it is no surprise that black internal migration was already too late. And consider this – it was only Indian and Chinese socialism that prevented US and Australian manufacturing being killed off even earlier.
While that gave space for Germans and other northern Europeans to differentiate into the quality end, all it did was encourage the US into a mass production game they couldn’t win when the low cost producers appeared.
I don’t know exactly were we are in economic cycles but have always figured Australia to be about 30 years behind the US. The rebuilding of the interstate mainlines we are now experiencing in Australia would correspond to the post war investment by the big roads in the US.
We know this with the rail industry in the USA – in the 30s they were running down capital and in the 40s they were consuming it, so by the 1950s any semblance of the 19th century system was pure waste, and what investment there was went into the now recognisable 20th century system. But this was the 50s. In Australia we spent nearly all the 20th century doing not much about anything with rail.
Tell me how a 1965 mixed train to Batlow, with a diesel locomotive up the front, replacing the 19 class steam of the year before, really represented any advance.
Sure, the loco no longer needed coal from a stage, or water from a tank, but the train still had 2 staff on the loco and one up the back in a wagon that was not revenue-generating. It still was lightly loaded and short. It carried a ridiculous staff or ticket 60 years after viable radios were built. The track was still steep and winding and didn’t go anywhere much.
Passengers were still carried at below-cost rates, while an acceptable road ran alongside, that could and did have buses on it. The timetable and transit time were still poor. You could ship to Sydney and maybe Melbourne or Brisbane, but not in one go to Adelaide or Perth.
How much valuable time (decades) was wasted not reforming labour costs, rebuilding track and routes for heavier locos and rollingstock, dumping unprofitable traffics including passengers, removing antiquated safeworking and having the same gauge, regulations and working practices nationwide?