The purpose of this paper is to use the historical example of the Midland Railway Company of Western Australia (Midland Railway) to answer the question of what private rail lines in Australia would have been organized and managed like if they had operated in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, the question of whether the privately owned Midland Railway operated at a comparable or higher level of efficiency than its government-owned counterpart in Western Australia will be addressed. The paper finds that it was possible for private interests to organize the raising of financial capital to construct and equip a large-scale, long-distance railway in Australia, and once built it was possible for a private managed line to generate a financial surplus, unlike many of its government counterparts, at least up until the 1950s when road transport finally began to threaten its viability.
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