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Cal said..
Yep, a bloody disgraceful situation with our lack of freight trains; so many bloody trucks doing long haul. Trucks for local, trains for distance, everyone would win. It would be soooo expensive to reinstall what we have pulled out, let aline a cutting edge future proofed system. A great nation building project though!
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, it used to be compulsory to send all freight by rail if a railway line went there.
So to send stuff to a destination which should have been a three hour road trip, it could take up to a week to send it by rail.

The situation was absolutely hopeless.
My poor old mum and dad used to have to resort to smuggling stuff in the back of the car, all covered up with rugs in case someone pulled them over to check, as sometimes happened. If you got caught you had to prove it was stuff for personal use and not for resale.
Because the rail had a government legislated monopoly they could be a slow and sloppy as they liked, and they really did like.
Stuff got smashed up, left behind, delivered to the wrong town, or just plain disappeared as a matter of course.
It was an almost impossible job to hurry things up.
Any attempt to hurry things up resulted it it going slower, as was the case with most things under the control of the unions, particularly anything which had to go through either the ports or the rail. If it had to go through both then you had double trouble.
Pretty much as soon as the monopoly was lifted, rail lost almost all it's freight to road, except for some grain transport or other things for which long term contracts could be drawn up and enforced.
I can order stuff ex east by road and it's delivered from their shop to my door in four or five days. from one side of australia to the other.
It used to take that long just to load it onto a train.

Rail is dead in australia because it deserved to be put down.

And it certainly deserved to be.
Good riddance.