Transport in Australia
The Australian mining sector is reliant upon rail to transport its product to Australia's ports for export.
There is a heavy reliance on road transport due to Australia's large area and low population density in considerable parts of the country.
[2] Another reason for the reliance upon roads is that the Australian rail network has not been sufficiently developed for a lot of the freight and passenger requirements in most areas of Australia.
The majority of road tunnels in Australia have been constructed since the 1990s to relieve traffic congestion in metropolitan areas, or to cross significant watercourses.
[6][7][8] Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have extensive suburban rail networks which have grown and expanded over time.
Trams have historically operated in many Australian towns and cities, with the majority of these being shut down before the 1970s in the belief that more widespread car ownership would render them unnecessary.
Trams once operated in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart, and a number of major regional cities including Ballarat, Bendigo, Broken Hill, Fremantle, Geelong, Kalgoorlie, Launceston, Maitland, Newcastle, Rockhampton, and Sorrento.
The Inner West Light Rail opened in Sydney in 1997 with the conversion of a disused section of the Metropolitan Goods line.
The following table presents an overview of multi-modal intra-city public transport networks in Australia's larger cities.
The only Australian capital cities without multi-modal networks is Darwin, which relies entirely on buses, and Hobart, which has sections of derelict railway.
Journey Beyond operates four trains: the Indian Pacific (Sydney-Adelaide-Perth), The Ghan (Adelaide-Alice Springs-Darwin), The Overland (Melbourne-Adelaide),[17] and the Great Southern (Brisbane-Melbourne-Adelaide).
Since the extension of the Ghan from Alice Springs to Darwin was completed in 2004, all mainland Australian capital cities are linked by standard gauge rail, for the first time.
In Tasmania, TasRail operates a short-haul narrow gauge freight system, that carries inter-modal and bulk mining goods.
TasRail is government-owned (by the State of Tasmania) and is going through significant below and above rail upgrades with new locomotives and wagons entering service.
A common carrier railway was proposed to serve the port of Oakajee just north of Geraldton, but this was later cancelled after a collapse in the iron ore price.
There are several pipeline systems including: Projects under construction or planned: Victoria Between 1850 and 1940, paddle steamers were used extensively on the Murray-Darling Basin to transport produce, especially wool and wheat, to river ports such as Echuca, Mannum and Goolwa.
However, the water levels of the inland waterways are highly unreliable, making the rivers impassable for large parts of the year.
A system of locks was created largely to overcome this variability, but the steamers were unable to compete with rail, and later, road transport.
After World War II, Qantas was nationalised and its domestic operations were transferred to Trans Australia Airlines in 1946.
[26][27] In 1954, the first flight from Australia to North America was completed, as a 60-passenger Qantas aircraft connected Sydney with San Francisco and Vancouver, having fuel stops at Fiji, Canton Island and Hawaii.
State Government owned rail services:
