The Trans-Australian Railway (TAR)

form of transport between the west coast and the eastern cities was a long and often rough sea voyage across the Great Australian Bight, while the first east-west crossing of the Nullarbor Plain on foot was achieved by the English explorer Edward Eyre and his indigenous Australian guide Wylie in 1841. In 1877 a telegraph line was built across the plain, and it was this man-made structure that a mining engineer called Arthur Richardson followed, when he set out in 1896 to be the first to ride a bicycle around the Australian continent. The first railway in Western Australia had opened in 1871, and by 1896 there was a 313-mile line going eastwards through the inhospitable landscape as far as Kalgoorlie. This line was built alongside a pipeline carrying drinking water to the arid goldfields around Kalgoorlie. Meanwhile, in the south-east of the continent, a railway line from Port Augusta to Oodnadetta had opened in 1891. These early railways in both the east and the west were built to the narrow gauge of 3ft 6in. In 1901, the self-governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia got together to form a federation. One of the incentives held out to Western Australia…