Cape Gauge was used in many countries throughout the world. It has been identified primarily with the Cape Colony in South Africa but was used first in the UK on a variety of tramways. Later its use extended into a number of countries in the Far East including New Zealand, Indonesia and in particular Japan.
Cape Gauge was chosen as the 'standard gauge' in Japan. This post provides an introduction to the historic railways of Japan. The story includes a variety of different gauges. The use of different gauges seems at least as complex as the situation in the UK.
This post is an introduction to the railways of Japan and centres around the use of Cape Gauge. ........
https://rogerfarnworth.com/2019/01/09/japanese-railway-history-cape-gauge
Fascinating historical material -- many thanks.
A bit of an "aside"; by my understanding, from contemporary reports: steam remained in regular everyday service on the Japanese state railways, a little longer than for the same situation in a number of Western European countries: the end in Japan is thought to have been about the turn of the year 1975 / 76. In the earlier 1970s, Japanese state-railways steam -- active chiefly on lesser lines, and disappearing first from the biggest island Honshu -- was still both relatively plentiful, and quite varied. Few British enthusiasts seem to have sampled it: one figures that as of nearly half a century ago -- dauntingly far-off and likely to be prohibitively expensive, for not all
that much gain. I have the impression that more American enthusiasts went there in those times: relatively, closer to home; and what with second-half-20th-century political and military matters, more closeness in general between the nations concerned.
Very interesting the way that the "Cape gauge" (3ft. 6in. / 1067mm) came to cover so much of the world; and that its first great exponent, and zealous evangelist for its merits, was not British, but the Norwegian Carl Abraham Pihl. (Norway had in the late 19th century, its own fierce "Battle of the Gauges" between the 3ft. 6in.'s champions headed by Pihl, and the proponents of the standard four-eight-and-a-half gauge. The tide turned in the last years of the 19th century; but much of the state system had been built and opened on the 3ft. 6in. -- and that same, dwindled only slowly: it was a fair number of decades before all the State 3ft. 6in. gauge was gone.)
It has always struck me as at least a little odd, both that the Cape gauge's very earliest users and popularisers were non-British; and that in British territory, India for secondary main lines -- and in due course the "daughter" system in East Africa -- used, instead, metre gauge. (I have seen this latter, attributed to its being decided on as a sop to the then energetic lobbyists in Britain, for our country's adopting the metric system.) The feeling is got, that maybe 150-odd years ago, there had not yet developed the degree of polarisation re weights and especially measures, which later came about (Britain and North America, Imperial; virtually everywhere else, metric) -- these things were then, perhaps, rather less clear-cut. I'm also rather taken with the way that, beginning in the early 1870s, the USA took to its heart for narrow-gauge secondary lines -- some of these, of very respectable length -- yet another gauge in the general ballpark of "roughly two-thirds of standard": that of 3ft. (917mm), relatively rare elsewhere. Stuff is imaginable along the lines of, "if those stinking Limeys and Canucks are gonna use 3ft. 6in., no way will we do likewise -- we'll durned well pick a different gauge !"
(with re-planting and re-growth guaranteed).