Railroad Track Gauges

I don't know about the Russians, but I once saw a show on TV about Australia that said they have several different railroad track gauges in that country. It seems that there is no national standard, leaving the provinces to decide the issue for themselves. Instead of unloading and reloading the cars at the provincial borders, they lift the cars off their wheel carriages and set them down on different wheel carriages with some kind of crane. They have gotten good at this over the years, and can do it so quickly that there has never been much public clamor for standardizing the gauges nationwide.

I seem to remember reading that there was a time in the US when there was no national standard track gauge. There were also narrow gauge tracks that were used in logging and mining, but they were locally owned and didn't connect with the national rail system.