Japan's Shinkansen S500, Wikipedia Commons image
It is telling that Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, has chosen Melbourne as the place to launch today the umpteenth study into a high speed rail corridor between Sydney and Newcastle.
It avoids the risk of a Sydney media lynching.
No-one in Melbourne cares about Sydney-Newcastle high speed rail other than that it might swallow Federal funds which could have been better spent entirely within Victoria.
But it is also evidence that one of the most astute political figures in Federal Labor was no match for the juvenile follies of the ALP’s campaign directors.
If he was he would have killed it, or changed it to something even faintly credible, like funding 10 kilometres of new double track metro lines in each of the capitals of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane over the next 10 years.
Something modest, but of instant voter appeal in all three states.
Or as Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane points out today, there are many better ways of investing in rail.
The first nonsense about the Sydney-Newcastle study is that is supposed to be part of a Melbourne-Brisbane high speed rail link.
The logical, cheaper and far shorter and faster route between Melbourne and Brisbane is through Albury-Wodonga and then inland NSW, a route that is dead flat for more than 90% of the way, with Dubbo the mid-point.
This was first recognised by the Whitlam Government, and given token acknowledgement in multiple federal and state studies and private proposals since then.
The emphasis wasn’t in most cases on high speed rail, but ‘faster’ rail, since a modern 160 kmh double track permanent way costs in general a small fraction per kilometre of the bill for constructing one capable of taking 350 kmh passenger trains.
(High speed rail is like supersonic flight in the context that as velocities rise above 180 kmh serious constraints on bogeys, track strength, turning moments, braking systems and related engineering requirements kick in. There are proven solutions, but they are very expensive.)
The automotrice version of the French TGV under test for use on secondary routes
Those earlier conveniently forgotten plans also put freight first, while no doubt encouraging inland expansion of existing or new towns further down the tracks.
Routing a high speed line between Melbourne and Brisbane through the monstrous obstacles of a Sydney-Newcastle link is a prescription for failure. And as efforts to modernise the US railroads amply demonstrate, high speed passenger trains and goods trains do not mix, and have never been mixed on the successful fast train routes of Japan, China, Taiwan, France or Germany.
Those obstacles between Sydney and Newcastle are geological and political. The existing Sydney-Newcastle line contours its way through and around the obstacles of a jumbled landscape of worn down canyons and mesas. The existing motorway straightens this route only to the extent that deep cuttings and bridges could be afforded, and at gradients which are too steep for current high speed surface technology, which require permanent ways as straight and flat as possible.
To really deliver trip time improvements between both nearby cities requires tunnelling and elevated track works of heroic proportion and cost, easily comparable to the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Ventilating and fire proofing these works to European or China standards requires exhaust stacks, and if Sydney road and rail tunnels of minuscule scale like the Chatswood-Epping underground or the M5 East are any guide, political uproar of generational magnitude lies in ambush.
Sydney is a transport planning disaster, presided over at the moment by a lightweight Labor Premier who has wasted $500 million or more on failing to construct a short metro in Sydney, and who repeatedly contradicted herself as to the projects status, and in her most recent grand vision, killed off every metropolitan road and rain project contemplated and repeatedly planned, and hyped, for the past 30 years.
The magnitude of the transport infrastructure disaster in Sydney, including airports, maritime facilities, roads, metros and heavy rail is such that it is beyond Federal or private sector rescue.
Step One in having a credible plan for a Melbourne-Brisbane link is to make it ‘faster’ rail rather than ‘high speed’ rail.
Step Two would be to bypass Sydney completely, and let it choke.
22 Comments
Step three would be for Sydney to stop whining about transport. I don’t think I have ever heard so many people in one place whinge endlessly about not much.
Ben, your knowledge of and advocacy for planes is undisputed but, that was just plain wrong.
Firstly you should understand the process. Infrastructure Australia is an organisation tasked with looking at the big picture. How all the various pieces of he puzzle fit together on a nationwide scale.
IA is not tasked with dealing with the minutia of each cities own network – except to the extent that that affects the broader nationwide picture. So your comments about the details of the Sydney rail network are somewhat non-sequitur.
IA is about getting the big picture right. It is not a funding body, but it will have a big say in what gets built and in what order in future – again for national scale projects.
One of those projects that has required proper, considered, non-political planning at the federal level is high speed rail. Leaving aside your objection to high speed rail in itself, for a moment. Let me make this clear. If you’re going to build a Brisbane to Melbourne high speed rail line then the place to start is the Sydney to Newcastle link.
Not only because the existing rail track is hopelessly out of date (its a damn good way to enjoy the scenery) but because the Sydney to Newcastle link has the right combination of two large population centers and relatively short distance. Is a seed from which a larger network can grow. And as an exercise in at least partial private funding its necessary to bring confidence to investors so that they can move to bigger things. Oh and confidence for the engineers too.
Indeed, you are faced with either a large investment in widening or duplicating (in part) the existing freeway or else displacing the same (mostly commuter) traffic onto rail. With a potential transit time of under one hour city to city clearly the rail option would be a winner over car transport and you’re talking about potentially tens of thousands of trips per day – far in excess of the present air corridor (and remember Newcastle Airport isnt exactly in Newcastle either.)
Yes there are serious technical issues but let me reassure you and your readers, just as the trains themselves improve, so does the art and science of tunneling. Indeed one of the nice things about the Newcastle/Sydney route is in fact all that sandstone which is actually easy to work with and in the main self supporting – it lends itself to deep cuttings and rapid tunneling. I’d predict that if the work did go ahead much of it would be tunnel/viaduct and the costings will surely come down with further overseas experience – need I quote you on some of the now very long and very successful rail tunnels. Heck, they’re even doing one from Spain to Morocco under the straits of Gibraltar.
Now to deal with the other issues you brought up. NSW suffered, despite being a Labor government, with a tendency towards too much faith in economic rationalism. In other words, a AAA credit rating, and poor infrastructure. And the influence of ivory towered bureaucrats who thought that selling off of power assets was the only way to raise funds. Mind you, the way Howard starved the states of funds didn’t help either.
And I might add that Rudd’s technocratic ways much criticised for being nerdy, nevertheless yielded Infrastructure Australia which is well on its way to putting some expert knowledge behind planning.
If you’re dead set against high speed trains because it competes with air travel – I have no sympathy for your cause. They are becoming an established fact.
More so. As I’ve said before the best use for High Speed Trains is in creating satellite cities, where the convenience and perceived social inclusion and opportunity of the bigger city is brought within physical reach. In other words, distances of 300Km or so. And that was based on the notion of what would now be regarded as medium speed trains.
Times move on and now 300Km/hr is considered passe and China now has a 1100Km link down to 3 hours. That makes Melbourne reachable in under 3 hours (from Sydney) even allowing for some stops and some compromises on the grade. At that point even I sit and start to wonder if it might just compete with air travel.
Certainly even long before you complete the whole shebang what you do do, by accident or not, is to bring about the decentralization goal. Indeed, that’s what happened with the F3 freeway in making the central coast happen. Now, at 3 times the speed, Newcastle becomes a suburb of Sydney (yes, ironically a faster trip than Penrith.. but hey.. hang on.. is that such a bad thing? Taking the pressure off outer Sydney.
You see one of the things that goes unsaid about this whole big city infrastructure madness is the more you try and cram people into a given geographical area, the more complex and expensive that infrastructure gets. In the end you end up spending so much on inner city motorways that you have to wonder if the same money won’t buy you more on regional centers and high speed transport links between them. And what high speed trains do is take the pressure off – they make the effective geographical are of what is considered to be one city, much much larger – reducing the cram effect.
As for the politics. One thing you should be aware of is that the high speed train idea is a very big deal here in Newcastle and is well received. And no doubt it is also a very clever bit of politics on the marginals on the central coast – but that’s just the timing of the announcement. The real positive is that this has happened thanks to an orderly and objective process outside of politics.
And one final thing. What they’re actually proposing is to identify route options and do some basic costing. If its not cost effective then so be it. But what this is an opportunity to bring forward the best construction ideas and the best engineers and try and reduce that cost.
One other correction. While you would never mix high speed passenger trains with heavy freight, one thing they are doing at least in France is bringing in dedicated high speed freight trains – I think the post office are responsible for that one.
Ah yes, you’ll find that postal train in here. And also a bunch of other useful information.
Also, one interesting factoid.. the Sydney Melbourne air route is the 4th busiest in the world. If the price were right, I’d rather take the train. Heck I’d pay a bit more for the sake of comfort.
http://www.canberrabusinesscouncil.com.au/submissions/files/7jz1c2_7990_High%20Speed%20Rail%20for%20Australia2.pdf
Because as a journalist whose focus is: “public administration of air transport and its safety, the accountability of the carriers, and space for everyone’s knees.”, we should really trust that you’ll be either a) objective or b) an expert when it comes to high speed rail let alone rail at all.
I suppose you haven’t heard of the continuing Clearways program and the South West Rail link or the Light Rail extensions? Yes the metro was an absolute disaster in almost every way possible (only positive thing was that it wasn’t actually built at all), but Keneally was the one to put a stop to the stupidity- think Nathan Rees if you want someone to blame for the waste of half a billion. Though I suppose we could count it as paying people to dig holes and fill them up again?
In my view there are a lot of issues with your article that show your bias on this issue or any form of transport that could compete with air travel.
Why would a potential rail link link Sydney to Newcastle announcement somehow result in a lynching? You don’t think the minister had any input into this idea?
So if it’s beyond Federal or private sector rescue, what now? The UN, councils?
Or perhaps Crikey could have a public transport blog and we’d have a proper debate.
Can I make it clear I’m passionately in favour of high speed trains and efficient metropolitan public transport of any type. However I know that without a sufficient density of population and an efficient means of reaching the high speed terminals the Guangzhou-Wuhan example isn’t going to happen in Australia.
Anthony Albanese went to Melbourne to announce a Sydney-Newcastle corridor study to run away from a media lynching. It is like going to Chatswood to announce plans for a Footscray to Caulfield rail and road tunnel.
In the 60 years that I have been as much a rail fan as a space cadet and airline fanatic, dating back to a childhood going to sea with my father in the school holidays on everything from colliers to the modest cargo ships of the times, I have observed what in later years I realised were lost opportunities for Australia in general and Sydney in particular to make world class planning decisions. It hurts.
However we need to start with the foundations and that means effective public transport, whether bus, light rail or heavy rail, and the facilitation of regional developments over shorter distances that become a coherent part of a greater national transport network.
I’m not arguing that connecting Sydney and Newcastle in a more timely manner is wrong, but to include it in a Melbourne-Brisbane routing is really silly, and simply intended to push a few electoral buttons. Think outside the Sydney confines here. The way to galvanise efficient surface rail in Newcastle, and benefit the city’s economy, is to have an RER type link to Port Macquarie, and rebuild or substantially upgrade the line through the upper Hunter and Sandy Hollow to connect grain and other freight to the ‘sensible’ and lower cost construction of an all purpose 160 kmh corridor from Melbourne to Brisbane at Dubbo.
Apply our decentralisation and development dollars to that corridor, and Newcastle-Port Macquarie and Newcastle-Dubbo, and the inland network from Melbourne-Albury/Wodonga and the regional centres right up to SE Queensland and we really achieve a great deal.
If we widen our focus a little more, the key to maritime infrastructure failures in NSW is not going to be found in attempting to solve Sydney’s lack of port facilities in coming decades, but by ensuring that maritime activity is satisfied in the Newcastle-Port Stephens area, where we can build port facilities on a grand scale.
As for a competitive Wuhan-Guangzhou rail service as described, enthusiastically, in Plane Talking earlier this year, I’d far rather use that to travel in comfort and economy between Sydney and Melbourne than fly on a 750 passenger configuration of the A380 in the 2020s. But the fact remains that in this country, with our population densities, the A380 type investment and economics will prevail over high speed rail on Sydney-Melbourne in the coming decades while between Paris and Frankfurt, TGV linkage will be achieved by around 2014 and superior metropolitan rail feeds at both ends plus a much larger population (and Strasbourg in the middle) will drive the air links out of business, just as the first TGV did to flights between Paris-Lyon.
Ben, very good analysis of the high speed train proposal – another silly election promise to a justifiably sceptical public.
However, as a proud Sydneysider, your final remark of “let Sydney choke” is offensive. We have had to endure a totally incompetent and visionless State government for over 10years; not to mention successive Federal governments who haven’t had the guts to make decisions on such infrastructure as a second airport or port improvements. Sydney’s problems are great (just as they are in other Australian capitals such as Melbourne and Brisbane) but they are not impossible to fix. It just takes a few strong and visionary leaders at both state and federal levels (which admittedly, based on the current crop, doesn’t hold much promise in the short term). It certainly not an excuse to just write the city off.
Rob,
‘Let it choke’ is something driven by frustration. There does appear to be an expectation in successive State administrations, well, in a near dynastic administration running successive governments, that massive Federal funds will be forthcoming.
There is also a near corrupt indulgence of consultants. NSW has spent truly awesome amounts on consultancies that have yielded nothing.
The funding issue is made worse by the scorching of a number of private equity consortiums, self inflicted or otherwise, that invested in an airport railway (real estate) play, and the Lane Cove and Cross City tunnels that relied on what must be the most damaging false projections of patronage ever made in relation to transport projects in this country.
This leaves us with a discouraging outlook in terms of both Federal funding and private equity participation.
There are a number of well argued views as where Sydney might realistically go from here. My own suggestion would be to complete the Chatswood-Epping line and extend it to Leppington, and also link it to a new cross harbour heavy rail link connecting to an augmented line passing through Barangaroo, and then Wynyard-Town Hall-Railway Square-Redfern. These would be big ticket items as they involve the re building of the Wynyard and Town Hall stations. And there a number of minor ticket but highly useful suggestions from a range of quarters for better use of light rail and dedicated bus lanes.
On a more fanciful level, I’m firmly of the view that Badgerys Creek should be built and made available to any jets manufactured after say 2005, to lever the much quieter airliners currently in production or being tested or developed, and that it should compete with the main airport under a different set of owners. Instead of terminating at Leppington the extension of the Parramatta-Chatswood line would run to the Sydney West airport, with additional express tracks providing a Paris RER type service to rail interchanges with the metropolitan network at Parramatta, Granville and maybe Strathfield and Redfern, where ghost platforms lie partly completed in readiness for direct connection with the ESR. (Someone saw the future, oh so long ago.)
Ben – Agree with most of that: I think the idea of rail at 300kmh plus for Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane is fanciful so long as there are such things as planes. I would confidently expect that a properly conducted study would come up with a “faster” option for Sydney-Newcastle rather than a “high speed” option – and that this would involve connecting into a second harbour crossing along the lines you suggest.
Did you notice that there was in fact also an announcement for detailed planning of the inland faster rail freight route? The ARTC site has links to the report on this – recommended that it be pursued as a medium term option i.e. viable to start operations around 2030 although not in the short term.
Ben, appreciate that you are actually a supporter of HSR and rail/public transport in general- it certainly doesn’t come across from your post!
As for your comment from 9.49am, I’d agree with your sentiments for the first half, but the last two paragraphs are indeed fanciful. Not for a lack of vision but for practicality’s sake. Take a look at this (the most recent publicly available long-term rail plan) for a clue why: http://www.aptnsw.org.au/christie/5.html and more specifically the map here: http://www.aptnsw.org.au/christie/fig_5_9.gif .
Rail has been discussed in relation to aviation matters here on a number of occasions.
Among them, a discussion of the Greens call for high speed rail which I related to the Wuhan-Guangzhou service (@http://tiny.cc/hac1o) which is actually longer than any likely route between Sydney and Melbourne, and a reference to the sensible use of rail to serve a second Sydney Airport at Badgery’s Creek (@http://tiny.cc/bxzyu).
It is interesting that since these items were discussed we have an emerging consensus that Australia should hold down population growth. Without going into that interesting and worthwhile debate, a slowly depopulating Australia, or one that grows more gradually, or one in which half the population has demented and is in care and not contributing taxes, all of these scenarios will remove the pressure on infrastructure, and the economic ability to even pay for the upkeep of existing services.
The reason Albo didn’t announce the political winner of track upgrading within a 10k radius of the major CBDs is they don’t have the dough. If they did the feds would have done it and thereby rescued at a stroke the Victorian election.
Labour need any more be said!
Ben, the argument that high speed trains need a sufficient population density merely begs the question of what the equation should look like. How much population and at what distance.
As I said, if a high speed train is viable then the one place it might be is Sydney to Newcastle, precisely because if you do the numbers, the highest figure of merit (population divided by distance) happens to be that particular route.
I chose to ignore your political barbs, but a) Albanese can hold his own with anyone and b) he has managed to create a system that is worthy of a lot of praise. If you’re in favor of sensible planning regarding transport infrastructure then you might like to advocate that state governments learn a thing or two from Infrastructure Australia.
Good on Albanese for doing that, and good on Rudd and Labor for it too. Its much much more than the standard of governance that the Liberals could ever rise to.
That’s not only wrong in two ways its needlessly loaded with political negativity. If your dream is to connect Brisbane with Melbourne then the ideal location to test the system is Sydney to Newcastle. This is a good thing for two reasons that I’ve pointed out and you’ve failed to acknowledge. First of all it gets the ball rolling and brings about a process where the viability of the larger project is properly and objectively studied rather than being speculated on (as you are doing). Secondly creating a working high speed train link serves as a template for later high speed train links and more vitally, it lets the private investors have a framework to work with.
As I said, the study is money well spent to answer such questions and shouldn’t be knocked just an exercise in sheer negativity. It really is necessary to just crunch the numbers and see what pops up. And in that I commend Albanese for giving it a go.
Yes but you are ignoring the fact that the current alignment is such that there is only one way to achieve any further speed up and that’s to completely forget the current alignment and build a new track. If so, then the question is begged, if you’re going to build a whole new train line over such difficult terrain, then why not spent the extra bucks and bring the new alignment up to high speed standards. Remember, the difference between a medium speed rail (160Km) and a high speed train (360Km) isn’t really much – the terrain screams “tunnel me” anyhow.
And if you need a faster train through to Port Macquarie you’re up against the same issues. Ancient track alignment – and in this case you’re dealing with ancient politics – taking the track through the upper Hunter purely because back then that’s where the timber was. Again, it calls for a totally new alignment, and in this case given modern methods for bridging you might as well go more coastal and and an entirely new route and the price differential for upgrading that to high speed standards isn’t great compared to the cost of the whole exercise in the first place.
Interesting idea that, but at conventional speed, a non starter. People want to commute to Sydney not Newcastle. If you would like a bigger picture, consider this, there is currently a push for a freeway out of Sydney along roughly the Bells Line of Road. It’d make a lot more sense for this to be a freeway combined with high speed rail. I guess the real choice is, do you open up the Lithgow/Bathurst area (and possibly Dubbo, but only if your trains are fast enough) to become an effective extension of Sydney, or do you instead focus on the Hunter. And the latter is possibly a better choice because of distances involved and there being more water resources in the Hunter.
The freight links in the Hunter are pretty much going off on their own accord. If you speak of Newcastle’s rail system in general that’s the topic of a much wider local war. And its pretty silly if you get into it with both sides not acknowledge the contributions of modern technology. The answer in short is to replace the trains on the Hunter line with a hybrid electric version that can stop quickly and can act like the Sydney light rail in the inner city of Newcastle. But that’s a diversion except that the best way to make the most use out of the existing Hunter line as a passenger line (its a loss maker right now) is again, to interconnect it with a high speed rail system to Sydney.
And that further encourages growth not just in Newcastle itself but along the entire Hunter.
That simply isn’t known and you should know better than just to assert it. The key point in keeping the cost of high speed rail down is in best-practice engineering and to a lesser extent keeping the efficiency of the trains themselves. Rather what you should be doing is supporting having the study so that we may come closer to the truth.
And you say that the necessary shifts in technology/population that would make a full on Sydney to Melbourne high speed rail are still decades away. Maybe this is so, but then a study might actually point to roughly when. And actually building one small part of the system does help to build knowledge both engineering and financial. After all, even in my wildest dreams, the Sydney Newcastle link wont get built till 2022 and the whole shebang may take decades anyhow to finally come together. So why bitch about a tentative first step that might give us some workable data?
And just to answer one other issue that seems to come up time and again from various posters on this issue.
There is a very big difference between the kinds of high speed trains we were talking about back in the 80s and those that we have now. Back when the VFT was first proposed it was a turkey and the reason was, it just wasn’t fast enough.
Its only at the point where Sydney – Melbourne becomes a 3 hour trip that the train concept becomes even remotely viable. Some will pay for comfort but most will pay for speed. Similarly there are many locations where a 160Km/hr train would be a white elephant over anything more than about 100Km trips. It certainly wouldn’t go down well as a train to Port Macquarie.
You’ve got to understand, and I’ll emphasise once again, that the reason people crowd themselves into big cities is because of the perceived benefits. Jobs, social inclusion, opportunity both personal and monetary. If you’re going to have a high speed train its first and foremost use is in making a big city effectively a much much bigger city. Its in giving people the same perceived benefits without having to physical crowd themselves and then we end up with the end result that building infrastructure within places like Sydney becomes more and more expensive. I hasten to mention the F3 to M2 link which is going to have to be nearly all tunnel and cost a fortune. This wouldn’t happen if you had a settlement pattern characterised by smaller, more liveable cities which thanks to high speed trains offered the benefits of the larger capital.
Moderate speed trains just aren’t worth it. They cost a lot more but they only tap into the much smaller market that they open up.
Ben, since we are talking politics here, and I am seriously scared of the danger of having Abbott, I should point out that the NBN (national broadband network) is a game changer – making it possible for people to do things at distance for which they would normally drive or fly.
It will make a huge difference to the way we do everything. Not just health care, but business and interpersonal relations. Infact if the airline industry should be scared of anything, its high speed networking. People will still want to meet each other in person – but to have fun – but the business trip may become (almost) a thing of the past.
Food for thought. May Abbott go back to that place where he belongs.
The political contest is between two conservative parties pandering to a core of swinging voters fearful of ‘people not like us’, neither of whom are prepared to deal with energy innovation or climate change in a meaningful way.
I had a similar view to about how a ubiquitous availability of high speed broadband communications would affect business travel until I began to realise what was really happening.
The first consequence of lower fare travel has been to allow quite large numbers of sole traders, academics and SMEs who previously rarely flew and did work the ‘phones and the net to make flying a habit. They lunch clients interstate rather than just call them. They attend conferences they never before attended. And when they do they spend about half their time it seems furtively using their Blackberrys to manage emails. The sidelines have become far more important than the set agendas as delegates download the presentations and even the live Q & A sessions. The flying, or Eurostar habit, has migrated from the top end of town to a much larger business constituency, and given that every single Boeing or Airbus video conference I have logged into since the start of the century has suffered serious technical glitches the face-to-face briefings remain quite important.
(Live video of the first flight of 787 was ruined for most people by their discovering that Boeing has set it up to require Flash 9, not Flash 10, so you had to go and find a software mortuary to downgrade with.)
I’m firmly of the more recent view now that communications technology will not significantly affect business travel by any mode unless through a fuel crisis or something left of field like a gigantic volcanic ash cloud the physical trip becomes too costly or impossible.
There is however a huge incentive from the NBN, or just a damn good network, to put up with even mediocre public transport. My own incredibly inferior rail options to Sydney take 2.45 to 3.15 hours and still require a long drive to a station. The drive is usually 1.45-2 hours from house to say the Opera House car park. But, even without the NBN which I look forward too, I can work on my computer, or use my Blackberry, about 70% of the way. And there is a power point at the end of each carriage put there for the cleaners if your battery is suss.
The NBN will be a strong incentive for some commuters to stop driving.
Cud chewer,
Let’s consider an alternative approach by IA to the study, which otherwise rakes over ground already trodden. Suppose it were to model how a realistic investment in 10 kilometres of tunnel could be used in the medium term to straighten part or parts of the existing line, versus what would be saved in time. Maybe even 15 kilometres, if we don’t end up with a project where 80% of the revenue is used to pay dividends to the private equity component rather than actually build anything.
The line would still need to be used by both freight and passenger services.
Or let’s dust off the plans for a set of three tunnels to straighten out the Waterfall-North Wollongong section of the Illawarra line, which would dramatically improve trip times for existing trains and pave the way for something that also moves faster. Who knows, we might even manage to extend the rail line into and beyond Nowra.
Of course Sydney is a fact of life and you can’t argue against fixing some of the worst bits. However, there is an expression called throwing good money after bad.
In the case of the Sydney/Newcastle train line for instance, piecemeal improvements buy you incremental but small reductions in time. Straightening out the worst of the line means essentially scrapping it and redoing from Gosford to Berowra.
But bringing yourself into a future where living in Newcastle (or its connected towns) is as good as living in Paramatta means only one thing – raw speed.
What high speed trains do is completely decouple geographical limits from how cities grow. Instead you end up with smaller, more livable cities, better connected.
It was once said that London had a natural limit to growth brought on by the pile up of horse manure. Funny how technology changes things.
And here’s a sensible article oddly enough from the not exactly left leaning Australian Business section.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/labors-high-speed-east-coast-rail-proposal-brings-vision-to-the-election-campaign/story-e6frg9if-1225902282423
This story began over what I see as the political bundling of a new or faster trip times by rail between Sydney and Newcastle, itself a highly commendable objective, with an overall Melbourne-Brisbane high speed link.
To use the French analogy, this would be like doing nothing about rail since the construction of the Midi canal and then decided to do a TGV and TER (train express regional) all at once in a decade or two and just pluck the money out of thin air.
There are several things that stand out in the belated dragging of transport infrastructure in this country into modern times. One is that it is work that will be completed by our grandchildren, and the other is that the funding will always fail if it follows any of the recent refinements in private public equity, which is the triumph of financial engineering over all other forms of engineering.
You raise the issue of planning, and one of the first questions I’d like to see resolved is the Sydney terminal for the link. Does it really need to be Central? Is there merit in making it Epping or Parramatta? The cost of the stage from city centre, wherever that may be in 50 years time, given the risk of a much higher storm tide contour, to the northern edge of the current metropolitan sprawl, is arguably going to cost a large fraction of the total bill.
If we could just get things like the Parramatta to Chatswood line finished, it becomes comparatively easy to reach Epping….with ear protection of course since we have already built some of the world’s nicest modern underground stations with one of the noisiest tunnels ever made.
Hypothetically, if the chosen route is 150 kilometres long, and we were to achieve an average trip time between the southern and northern terminals non-stop of 30 minutes, what is the premium for saving 30 minutes compared to a less costly route taking one hour? What would be the average time taken for people to backtrack or forward track to the southern or northern terminals?
Europe, Japan and China are naturally predisposed to deploy fast surface transport technologies more successfully than we can. We do not have the money to emulate them in a grand all-at-once strategy. And we wilfully misuse our existing infrastructure. Changing these things in Australia needs a century long strategy, and one that models the unexpected, such as a the sea possibly rising high enough to disrupt those portions of the Sydney underground that are already vulnerable to flooding (the ESR where it goes under Haymarket for example). Or the disruption of an aged, non-productive population, and other critical factors.
That’s why I would vote for the gradualist (but enlightened) tendency in transport infrastructure, and of course, there isn’t one to vote for. All we can vote for in this election is more consultancy fees and more diversion of money into the financial engineering of projects which all too often are incorrectly specified or left incomplete.
Ben,
You are out of your depth and badly in need of an options study. The Newcastle thing is interesting to me, because I used to live there. Newcastle-Dubbo, on the other hand, is a real wildcat, with megatonne mines spread along its route, planned additions and tunnels and passing loops and current upgrades (eg at Whittingham – almost completed) and so forth.
Trying to mix 15,000 tonne coal trains 1.7km long with 100 metre long passenger rail has been the nightmare of the Hunter for at least 30 years. It won’t change any time soon. As for the proposal to electrify this track – who is offering to replace the dozens of bridges and widen the permanent way and provide power supplies and overhead carriers suitable for 7 MW groups of locos?
Quite simply, if the HST is to be constructed between Newcastle and Sydney or from Dubbo to Cairnes or whatever, there needs to be careful consideration of the existing rail traffic – local passenger rail, goods rail, bulk coal or ore, etc. It might be better to keep the old running in parallel with the new.
To come back to where I started, what is needed is the best options study that money and engineers can buy. Then we can read and discuss, with one eye on the facts instead of mainly guesswork and hopes.
This has not been your best ever work, but please keep it up.
John,
This has not been your most attentive reading either. As I mentioned in relation to freight and high speed rail, for example.
Quote.Routing a high speed line between Melbourne and Brisbane through the monstrous obstacles of a Sydney-Newcastle link is a prescription for failure. And as efforts to modernise the US railroads amply demonstrate, high speed passenger trains and goods trains do not mix, and have never been mixed on the successful fast train routes of Japan, China, Taiwan, France or Germany. Unquote.
We need to stop consultancy feeding frenzy, end the excesses of financial engineering of private public partnerships, and get back to building things.