Australia is home to 33,819km of railway track, and there are regular services to all mainland capital cities (except Canberra, but no one wants to go there anyway). The history of train travel in Australia would be an incredibly boring story if it weren't for the fact that the early colonists were either stupid, or stubborn enough (perhaps both) to build their first tracks in completely different gauges, so when they inevitably met up, everyone had to change trains.
For many years every single colony/state had tracks spaced at a different width, and you can imagine this would have been pretty annoying at the time. Getting things standardised was a bureaucratic nightmare ("you change your tracks. No, you change yours. We were here first. We have more trains. Ours are better. We're happy to change ours if you pay for it. I'm not paying for it, you pay for it. Let's get the federal government to pay for it. The federal government doesn't exist yet. Oh yeah. You pay for it. Bugger off. etc. etc."), and even today, there are still railways to major towns that don't meet up with the rest of the national system. Getting the whole thing sorted would have been as annoying as trying to get cars to drive on the right hand side of the road now, but train buffs are a persistent lot, and to their credit, you can get from point A to most other letters on the south or eastern Australian coastline in a train and you won't have to change too often (which is no mean feat considering the amount of track and the distances).
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