ABSTRACT
The meeting was over, a motion to remove the rail tracks was passed-and yet a rail revival seemed almost certain. Friends of the Railway (F.O.R.) in Perth, Australia, was trying to restore the Perth-Fremantle railway in 1982 after the government had closed it in 1978. Perth was a modern city and the car was king. The government wanted the railway reserve to become a freeway, and buses were to replace the trains. But since the rail’s closure, buses had lost 30 percent of the riders who had used the train. Further, the first signs of a global oil crisis had hit Australia in 1979, and a transportation system entirely reliant on oilfueled cars and buses did not seem sensible.1
