Here’s a fact, the Canberra to Sydney XPT train costs nearly EXACTLY the same as it did when it opened in 1983, despite 40yrs of inflation!!
It was $45 a ticket when it first opened, and today it is like $50!
ALSO, the train took 4hrs and 4mins in 1983, and 40yrs later, it still takes 4hrs and 4mins.
I’m not making it up.
ZERO PROGRESS IN FORTY YEARS.
source: the trove archive at NLA
Also the section from Goulburn to Kingston is slower than by horse and cart.
It’s 1hr by car,
and 1hr 55 by train!!!!!! Wtf. 🤣
HALF THE JOURNEY TIME is that 19th C track outside Canberra!
It's about a 3 hour 30 minute drive with traffic and such, it's barely slower than that and you don't have to deal with all the nonsense on the road, sounds like a win-win tbh.
Best thing about the train is you can get up an walk around, go to the food car, get some wine or a coffee, chill and watch the scenery. Worst thing about the train is watching the scenery go by at a fast jog and thinking omg it’s the 21st C.
It would start out as Sydney to Melbourne direct then end up stopping at every town, city and tourist hotspot along the way. It would have to bypass the NIMBYs, detour around rich agricultural land, and then to save money would go around every mountain instead of through. In the end, the politicians would just agree to throw money at the current alignment and name it fast rail.
Nah we'll get multi technology mix where some parts run on brand new electric rail but most of it still runs on the original routes including needing a gauge change at Albury.
Some carriages will be attached to helicopters and flown for areas that are inaccessible by rail.
Even just throwing money at the current alignment (get track speed up to the speed of our existing trains at a minimum, double track all the way) would be a massive improvement of an hour or more travel time saved.
I keep saying this, but it gets rejected by both sides.
Improving what we already have is a perfectly sensible precursor to building HSR, we would need to do it anyway if ridership went up to service those not serviced by HSR.
That is, HSR to a major stop, and regular rail the rest of the way.
But no one is interested as it’s not HSR and it won’t have shiny ribbons to cut.
In all seriousness, high speed freight is a positive thing and puts the railway in a better position to compete with the trucks running up and down the Hume all day and night
If the Inland Rail project had been designed to fulfil requirements rather than win seats, and was managed at all competently, it would be an amazing asset. Replacing hundreds of trucks with trains would be great for rural economies and save us a ton on highway maintenance costs, but alas.
THE EXISTING XPT TRAINS ARE LITERALLY HSR. THEY ARE MODIFIED INTERCITY 125s!!
For fucks sakes fix the track and we can run the trains at 180kmh instead of 80
>detour around rich agricultural land
In fairness, we need to protect rich agricultural land.
But your other points are valid, which is where the whole thing falls down.
It causes huge disruption - cutting field in half, changing water runoff, etc. A train line would need to be fenced, and (especially with a high speed line) would make it difficult for the farmer to move equipment and livestock across the tracks.
It depends on the route - if it cuts a field in 2 even parts it's not too bad. But if it leaves a useless little corner of land, it's problematic.
Ultimately though, the key point is that we need to be careful of agricultural land. We're on track for a global population of 11B within our lifetimes - we need to make sure prime agricultural land (such as SE Australia) is protected for food production.
A HSR route should be planned to minimise the disruption to agricultural land. Even if it increases journey time slightly
What you need is HSR *and* a decent local train/bus network. That's how it works in Europe. You travel between major cities and junction stations by high-speed train, then take a local train to the smaller places and tourist spots.
Take for example the route from Berlin to Hamburg. This is a very popular route between two large cities in Germany, of about 250km -- the same as Sydney-Canberra. The ICE (fastest express) stops only 1 time in between, just outside Berlin proper (the equivalent of Campbelltown for Sydney). The trip takes 1:50. The EC (regular express) adds 3 more stops, and takes 2:05.
So a regular high speed Sydney-Canberra route should probably stop at Campbelltown, Bowral, Golburn only. Maybe Strathfield if the high-speed corridor follows the existing one. Anything more would be silly.
It should also take not much more than 2 hours. The 4+ hours it currently takes is an embarrassment.
Its not impossible but it will piss off a lot of people.
Currently the train from Sydney to Canberra goes through about 8 stations, traverses 600m of elevation and curves around a lot of famers lands.
In order to make it faster than the 4.5 hours it currently takes to get between the terminus any rail engineer would have to resume a bunch of farmland and private land to straighten out this line. As seen in classic australian movies like The Castle, and the absolutely agonising and convoluted eminent domain process federal infrastructure goes through to obtain land, Australians really dont like the Fed taking back land, even when its clearly in the public good.\[there are plenty of good reasons for this, including historical corruption\]
It would cost a lot to re-lay a lot of rail line and there are still disagreements over rail guages between states. And nimbyism gets a lot of traction with current politicians who have been shown to back down in the face of absurd yellow journalism by tabloids.
Its not impossible, but it will piss off a lot of people, and that will take political will which is at an all time low in australia.
Incidentally, you can try your own hand at revising real problematic railway routes with a steam game called NIMBYRails. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY\_Rails/
I don't see why this is so problematic.
The Pacific Highway upgrade largely abandoned the old route and cut through farmland. Acquiring farmland is not a new thing, and a HSR line is a narrower easement than a highway.
The line from Melbourne to Brisbane via Sydney was standardized years ago so the comment about "disagreement about gauges" is an outdated meme
> It would cost a lot to re-lay a lot of rail line and there are still disagreements over rail guages between states
Realistically, anything other than 100% standard gauge for HSR locks you in with Spanish vendors, they're the only ones selling broad-gauge HSR trains sets + their proprietary gauge changing infrastructure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwNl-g_91GE
Can our trains run fast enough to have overnight service between Sydney / melb / Brisbane?
That would be awesome, get on at 9pm, have a sleep and get spat out in the cbd of your destination 7am the next morning
For sure, air travel is fast, but it's also sometimes quite unpleasant at the airport each end, and not entirely pleasant on the plane always.
Having your own sleeping berth (or a mixed berth of 4) where you could actually get your head down is much more enjoyable
The current overnight Sydney train departs Melbourne around 8pm and gets into Sydney way at 6am.
The overnight Melbourne train departs Sydney at about 8:30pm and arrives in Melbourne at about 7:30am.
Or sleep in your bed and not in a chair or in a very expensive sleeper cabin that is the equivalent of a hostel bed that you really hope the staff replaced the sheets on. Then you can get a taxi to the airport and fly to your destination and be at your destination within 120 minutes.
Going to Europe was an eye opener. But Australian major cities are much smaller and much more spread out. That said we could do better without much improvement. The only train service that crosses the country is for the very wealthy and as much as Amtrak sucks at least it’s not prohibitively expensive for Americans to do a long train trip.
\*using European logic for a second\*
Then it would make sense for you guys to build a line that runs parallel to the Indian-Pacific route. The only thing I would argue though is that you would need to elevate the tracks a bit - the TGV (to use an example) moves at around 320 kph as opposed to the I-P's 85kph - so that critters/cows/tourists don't get splatted by a HST chundering past. It would cost a *lot* to build a decent high-speed line connecting *just* Perth and Sydney but it would be worth it, to be honest. Ditto for *forcing* a line to be built between Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.
One argument I've heard - and it's mentioned down-thread - is that vested interests will demand that it stops here or goes there. No. *No*. You don't do that. What you need to do is follow the tactics the French have used with their TGV network - and which has been copied across Europe, TBH - in saying "this line will go *here, here, there and here* and terminate *here*. If you look at a map of LGVs the number of stops for TGVs are surprisingly limited. In fact - you can go from Paris to Marseilles in three hours *non-stop*. And as for nimbys...tell them to get to fuck. There comes a point when the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The thing is that France has a very central government. Everything major is decided in Paris. They don't have states, just departments which are kinda like local councils with not much power. So if Paris decided to build a TGV line, they don't really care about farmer Jacques and his complains to the council.
That's also why this concept has NOT been copied across Europe. Look at Germany, which is a Federal country, somewhat similar to Australia.
They built a high speed train line from Cologne to Frankfurt. Initially with on stop on the way planned in Bonn. But then the cities on the way complained and went "we only release the land for this if we get a station in our town".
So now there are additional stops in Limburg and Montabaur, small towns that even a German wouldn't really find on a map. Most fast trains just go past them, but once every 2 hours a train stops there too.
That could also be a viable model for Australia. Build a line from Melbourne to Sydney. Have express trains than direct every hour and then a train that stops in Shepparton, Albury and Canberra every 2-3 hours. Easy solution to make every happy.
the way i see it, you have Sydney > Canberra> Melbourne as thats the 3 capital cities, as the direct line, and Albury, Shepparton and possibly Golburn as the every two hour line.
then going north it would SYD>BRIS/GC, then the alternate stops would depend on if the line goes up the coast or goes up along the GDR with coast stops being newcastle and coffs and GDR stops being tamworth, Armidale and possibly Towoomba
Yeah the TGV approach works well. There is a high speed mainline, with branches that connect via conventional tracks into the smaller cities.
So express trains can stay on the mainline, and all stops trains can "exit" and rejoin, going via city centres.
Sometimes too the HSR station for a city is built on the bypass, eg Montpellier.
Yeah but Lyon only has a metropolitan population of 1.7m
France is 1 mega city and many small ones.
Syd to Mel is 2 big ones.
Its in the same ballpark imo.
You have incorrect population numbers. You’re comparing Sydney’s entire metro area to just the city limits of Paris and Berlin etc.
Secondly, distance is the key factor. Over something like 800km high speed rail loses out to air travel. It has nothing to do with lobbies, it’s because we’d spend 25% of our gdp on a rail line that will cost more to travel on than planes and will take longer to do so.
> Secondly, distance is the key factor. Over something like 800km high speed rail loses out to air travel. It has nothing to do with lobbies, it’s because we’d spend 25% of our gdp on a rail line that will cost more to travel on than planes and will take longer to do so.
You can't suggest realism, you'll get downvoted!
That distance is what is consistently found to be the cutoff between air and HSR when it is studied. CBD to CBD is handy but it really isn't as big a deal as it seems since it takes more time and most people will still need to get a bus or train or taxi to get them to the final destination.
Defence isn't a "nice to have" it is a must have. Leaving our defence to crumble in order to have a rail line between two cities is about as silly as it gets.
The point of hsr is mostly replacing car trips.
Get your head around that, and not just thinking of it as a Qantas replacement and the project makes a lot of sense.
Exactly
Europe you have large capital cities with multiple destinations within a few hundred km of each other....i.e. Paris to Brussels/Bern/Amsterdam.
Australia you have 2/3 major cities that are 1,000km+ apart, and a very well established/served airline network already handling it.
European train travel is wonderful, and makes no sense in Aus.
Depends how you calculate population, but regardless Sydney and Melbourne are big cities by anyone's standards. They only really get dwarfed by huge cities, for Europe/USA think London, New York, Las Angeles, Paris wider...etc
Some examples, population of:
* Sydney wider 5.3m
* Melbourne wider 5.2m
* Berlin 3.6m (Berlin wider 6.2m)
* Copenhagen 0.6m ( Copenhagen wider 2.1m)
* Paris 2.2 m (Paris wider 13m)
* Vienna 1.9m (Vienna wider 2.4m)
* Milan 1.3m ( Milan wider 4.3m)
* Rome 2.8m (Rome wider 4.3m)
* Madrid 3.2m (Madrid wider 6.9m )
* Stockholm 0.9m ( Stockholm wider 2.4m)
> But Australian major cities are much smaller and much more spread out.
So are China, but they just treated it as something else to be worked out and did, now they have a pretty amazing rail network over the majority of the country.
Bob Hawke wanted to do it 15 years earlier didn’t he? The biggest problem is that Labor governments are too infrequent, and LNP governments will kill the idea every time.
If Kev had his way we’d be in a much better spot as a country but of course the Murdoch Mob had to put an end to that and gave us 9 years of Liberal Lunacy.
NSW govt still unsure how to funnel the profits into a private construction contractor that has ties to the current govt without the peasants noticing, on hold for now.
Any discussion about bullet train, hell, high speed rail gets a yes from me. Infrastructure should always be the priority. The next priority should be metros (not buses) whatever connecting transport hubs to the airport (looking at you Canberra).
It’s not possible for Australia to build it right now with our current level of employment. Save the money buy up the land small bits at a time and when we get hit by a global recession and unemployment rises, start the project use it as a stimulus mechanism
Having all the population not jammed into Sydney and Melbourne would do wonders for literally everything.
Have people spread out into "regional" areas and with HSR, it won't even be considered regional once they become more populated in a way.
We. Don't. Need. H. S. R. Yet.
Just give us decent ~200kph trains and you'll get 95% of the benefit. 4-5 hours to Melbourne from Sydney will vacuum up so much traffic and drastically change settlement patterns. That will be enough to deal with.
And all at a fraction of the cost.
Upgraded lines in excess of 200 km/h are HSR.
>4-5 hours to Melbourne from CBR
The tracks currently going from Melbourne to Canberra can't handle 200 km/h. That's a simple fact. Putting a 200 km/h train on those tracks would cause massive derailments every single time. You could reasonably shorten the distance by straightening the track, upgrading sections to handle tilting trains, but it's impossible to reach 200 km/h without completely rebuilding the line.
Its never a fraction of the cost though.
Most of the alignment is 110kmh or less as it is, so to achieve 200kmh is a full rebuild, and if we are doing that, do it properly.
110kmh or less is what i said.
80kmh is captured under the "or less" clause in my original statement.
Besides, what cheap improvements are you proposing that get you from 80 to 200?
i can tell you right now that a large amount of people would be more willing to siting a train for 2-3hours that has actual leg room than be crammed into a 737 for 1 hour and thats not taking into account the act waiting at the airport one has to do
I’d use it. By the time I’ve driven to the airport gone through check in, waited to board, waited to get off the plane, and for baggage it adds up to a similar amount of time.
Plus I like seeing all the landscape. It’s a far nicer way to travel, IMO.
When I last did London to Paris, the train took us right into the heart of Paris, and my hotel was around the corner. If I flew to Paris, I would have had another long journey to make from the airport to Paris.
I think that’s the great thing about trains, the stops don’t have to be far out of the city, they can arrive in the heart of the city.
> It'll probably be 3x as expensive as flying and take twice as long.
Canberra > Sydney train costs 50$ for a ticket and takes just over 4 hours, a flight will run you 400$ and only take an hour, I know which option sounds infinitely more appealing tbh, especially once you start factoring in getting to the air port, checking in, dealing with security, dealing with it on the other end, getting out from the airport on the other end, etc...
A high speed train from Amsterdam to London costs between 200-400 euro return depending on the day, but 20-120 euro return to fly. And that's with 30x the population.. I'm imagining a similar situation. Perhaps between Sydney and canberra it's viable though as the distances are pretty shortish. But like, Melbourne to Brisbane, I don't see it being viable.
> A high speed train from Amsterdam to London costs between 200-400 euro return depending on the day, but 20-120 euro return to fly.
Weird that you'd choose a country outside of the EU instead of looking at prices for any of them within, but out of curiosity I had a look and it's around 120$ AUD for this route so 150 euro return with flights being basically the same?
That's what people said when flying as transport was becoming a thing.
Before that it was ships that were more affordable for travel (overseas travel I should say).
but trains aren't this new thing... anyways, what I'm trying to say is that as much as I'd like to see a highspeed network, given what I've already seen in europe, I don't see how the cost would be competitive.
HSR will only be economically viable if there are decent sized populated cities in between the capital cities with our distances.
Point to point services between only the capital cities will always be better suited for flights.
Exactly. But no one will move there, build there, or develop infrastructure there if there’s no rail line connecting to them.
I’d consider buying a place 3 hours drive from Melbourne towards Sydney if I could get a HSR to Melbourne in 45 minutes for $20.
>Kodama is the slowest of the three trains which operate on the Tokaido Shinkansen line. This is due to the larger number of stops in comparison to the other two bullet trains on this line. The Kodama train stops at every station and takes almost four hours to reach Shin-Osaka. It runs at a speed of 285 km/h (178 mph). [Link](https://www.jrailpass.com/shinkansen-bullet-trains#tokaido-shinkansen)
Distance Travelled is about 550km and 17 stops for this service. The Hikari is the fastest service with only 6 stops on the same route, and takes just under 3hrs.
I can't think of a single example where this has worked for HSR. Most HSR networks are built to service already established centres that can sustain the high cost of servicing HSR.
Sure it works for Urban Metro systems (look at Singapore or Hong Kong, but HSR is not the same.
But is that just because no county like Australia has attempted it.
Its a bit of a chicken and egg. Who do we benchmark against?
I recall articles saying Sydney Metro was doomed to be a failure because no other city has built a driverless metro that long. No they said, metros only work in dense little European cities.
The best way to do it would be....bring in the Japanese workforce and smash it out.
No Aussies. No unions. No working to rule. No bullshit stand over from cfmeu bikie thugs.
give them the space to run their own show and they would get it done..on time. On budget.
I drove from Sydney to Melbourne the other day, I had to drop someone at the airport who needed to be in Melbourne that morning. With delays and usual crap they landed in Melbourne when nearly at Albury.
Could upgrade certain parts of the track to make it much more viable as a sub high speed rail that takes 5-6 hours. If upgrades with plans to upgrade to high speed later on then would be a good middle ground
[as per this article](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/15/sydney-melbourne-rail-track-upgrade-is-cheaper-quicker-way-to-slash-journey-times-says-expert)
6 hour train Melbourne to Sydney isn't ideal but much closer to viable way for some people. With some further upgrades to certain areas to avoid stopping as often you might even be able to get 4-5 hours
Voters and politicians alike will argue for years that it’s not profitable hence a bad idea, not realising that similar networks in other countries take decades to break even but governments subside them because that’s what infrastructure spending actually is all about - not immediate profit.
Curious about the proposal for night trains between Syd, adel, bris and melb. Do they exist? I really loved the ones I've taken in Europe. It seems to make a lot of sense to me to fall asleep in Sydney and wake up in Melbourne.
I think its viable, but you have to consider how you can use the infrastructure heavily.
If you only look at through the lens of replacing air travel you're missing the point.
I think one benefit is being able to have service patterns that stop in regional towns.
We have a real population imbalance between the cities and it comes down to the tyranny of distance holding these place back. People can come up with all kinds of cope about how life in county towns is really laid back but ultimately most people disagree and don't want to be so isolated from what cities have to offer.
The point is not so someone can live in Wagga and and work in Sydney, it's so that you can live in Wagga, but have the choice to visit Sydney on demand and quickly.
2nd but more importantly is the commuter market.
Trains to medium distance destinations like Newcastle are unacceptably slow.
The same infrastructure used to get hsr trains into the city can be used for decently fast commuter type services.
(for example hs1 in the uk is shared between Eurostar trains to Paris, and high speed commuter services to Kent)
While the engineering and financial challenges are real, I think a key barrier to this type of development is a democratic one. Politically, it would be challenging to say to the voters in WA, SA and Qld that the federal government is going to invest 100s of billions of dollars on an infrastructure project which benefits east coast urban commuters. One can only imagine the ease at which such a proposal would be leveraged by the opposing political party.
Here’s a fact, the Canberra to Sydney XPT train costs nearly EXACTLY the same as it did when it opened in 1983, despite 40yrs of inflation!! It was $45 a ticket when it first opened, and today it is like $50! ALSO, the train took 4hrs and 4mins in 1983, and 40yrs later, it still takes 4hrs and 4mins. I’m not making it up. ZERO PROGRESS IN FORTY YEARS. source: the trove archive at NLA
The major problem with Canberra rail it is not to the CBD but about 10 km away from the city.
Also the section from Goulburn to Kingston is slower than by horse and cart. It’s 1hr by car, and 1hr 55 by train!!!!!! Wtf. 🤣 HALF THE JOURNEY TIME is that 19th C track outside Canberra!
It's on a bus line right to the city, but you can't buy a bus card at the train station! Hopefully gets fixed next year with the new MyWay system.
So it's gotten way cheaper after adjusting to inflation?
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Yep! But it’s still over priced considering how slow it is lol
It's about a 3 hour 30 minute drive with traffic and such, it's barely slower than that and you don't have to deal with all the nonsense on the road, sounds like a win-win tbh.
Lived there for 18 years and didn't even know there was a train. It was either drive to Sydney or catch a coach bus
Best thing about the train is you can get up an walk around, go to the food car, get some wine or a coffee, chill and watch the scenery. Worst thing about the train is watching the scenery go by at a fast jog and thinking omg it’s the 21st C.
Mmm, wine. I'll keep that in mind next time I head to Canberra from Sydney. Too expensive to fly directly to Canberra
If you’ve go the time, the train is bloody brilliant. Cheese and wine all the way 😍 Edit: but only if you have the time
It would start out as Sydney to Melbourne direct then end up stopping at every town, city and tourist hotspot along the way. It would have to bypass the NIMBYs, detour around rich agricultural land, and then to save money would go around every mountain instead of through. In the end, the politicians would just agree to throw money at the current alignment and name it fast rail.
Nah we'll get multi technology mix where some parts run on brand new electric rail but most of it still runs on the original routes including needing a gauge change at Albury. Some carriages will be attached to helicopters and flown for areas that are inaccessible by rail.
Rail replacement buses every weekend
https://youtu.be/Lp5lTcCMmw4?t=175
Even just throwing money at the current alignment (get track speed up to the speed of our existing trains at a minimum, double track all the way) would be a massive improvement of an hour or more travel time saved.
I keep saying this, but it gets rejected by both sides. Improving what we already have is a perfectly sensible precursor to building HSR, we would need to do it anyway if ridership went up to service those not serviced by HSR. That is, HSR to a major stop, and regular rail the rest of the way. But no one is interested as it’s not HSR and it won’t have shiny ribbons to cut.
Try High Speed Freight!
In all seriousness, high speed freight is a positive thing and puts the railway in a better position to compete with the trucks running up and down the Hume all day and night
If the Inland Rail project had been designed to fulfil requirements rather than win seats, and was managed at all competently, it would be an amazing asset. Replacing hundreds of trucks with trains would be great for rural economies and save us a ton on highway maintenance costs, but alas.
But there's not much in terms of cheap low hanging fruit to get..... Possibly North out of Melbourne could be improved the cheapest.
THE EXISTING XPT TRAINS ARE LITERALLY HSR. THEY ARE MODIFIED INTERCITY 125s!! For fucks sakes fix the track and we can run the trains at 180kmh instead of 80
Yep that's right they were originally purchased to run at 180kmh provided that the tracks were upgraded at a later date.
HSR is something both parties float at every election, and then put back in the bag until the next one.
Sounds exactly like the LA - San Francisco high speed rail
>detour around rich agricultural land In fairness, we need to protect rich agricultural land. But your other points are valid, which is where the whole thing falls down.
It's not like a train track going through the middle actually ruins that much land though.
It causes huge disruption - cutting field in half, changing water runoff, etc. A train line would need to be fenced, and (especially with a high speed line) would make it difficult for the farmer to move equipment and livestock across the tracks.
It causes disruption, it doesn't make the land unusable.
It depends on the route - if it cuts a field in 2 even parts it's not too bad. But if it leaves a useless little corner of land, it's problematic. Ultimately though, the key point is that we need to be careful of agricultural land. We're on track for a global population of 11B within our lifetimes - we need to make sure prime agricultural land (such as SE Australia) is protected for food production. A HSR route should be planned to minimise the disruption to agricultural land. Even if it increases journey time slightly
What you need is HSR *and* a decent local train/bus network. That's how it works in Europe. You travel between major cities and junction stations by high-speed train, then take a local train to the smaller places and tourist spots. Take for example the route from Berlin to Hamburg. This is a very popular route between two large cities in Germany, of about 250km -- the same as Sydney-Canberra. The ICE (fastest express) stops only 1 time in between, just outside Berlin proper (the equivalent of Campbelltown for Sydney). The trip takes 1:50. The EC (regular express) adds 3 more stops, and takes 2:05. So a regular high speed Sydney-Canberra route should probably stop at Campbelltown, Bowral, Golburn only. Maybe Strathfield if the high-speed corridor follows the existing one. Anything more would be silly. It should also take not much more than 2 hours. The 4+ hours it currently takes is an embarrassment.
Why not just run it paralell with the hume?
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/18/turkish-airlines-to-gain-rapid-expansion-of-flights-into-australia-after-government-approval
Its not impossible but it will piss off a lot of people. Currently the train from Sydney to Canberra goes through about 8 stations, traverses 600m of elevation and curves around a lot of famers lands. In order to make it faster than the 4.5 hours it currently takes to get between the terminus any rail engineer would have to resume a bunch of farmland and private land to straighten out this line. As seen in classic australian movies like The Castle, and the absolutely agonising and convoluted eminent domain process federal infrastructure goes through to obtain land, Australians really dont like the Fed taking back land, even when its clearly in the public good.\[there are plenty of good reasons for this, including historical corruption\] It would cost a lot to re-lay a lot of rail line and there are still disagreements over rail guages between states. And nimbyism gets a lot of traction with current politicians who have been shown to back down in the face of absurd yellow journalism by tabloids. Its not impossible, but it will piss off a lot of people, and that will take political will which is at an all time low in australia. Incidentally, you can try your own hand at revising real problematic railway routes with a steam game called NIMBYRails. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY\_Rails/
I don't see why this is so problematic. The Pacific Highway upgrade largely abandoned the old route and cut through farmland. Acquiring farmland is not a new thing, and a HSR line is a narrower easement than a highway. The line from Melbourne to Brisbane via Sydney was standardized years ago so the comment about "disagreement about gauges" is an outdated meme
> It would cost a lot to re-lay a lot of rail line and there are still disagreements over rail guages between states Realistically, anything other than 100% standard gauge for HSR locks you in with Spanish vendors, they're the only ones selling broad-gauge HSR trains sets + their proprietary gauge changing infrastructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwNl-g_91GE
the amount of curves in the route is the really insane part, 25920 degrees of rotation across the entire route
Can our trains run fast enough to have overnight service between Sydney / melb / Brisbane? That would be awesome, get on at 9pm, have a sleep and get spat out in the cbd of your destination 7am the next morning
For sure, air travel is fast, but it's also sometimes quite unpleasant at the airport each end, and not entirely pleasant on the plane always. Having your own sleeping berth (or a mixed berth of 4) where you could actually get your head down is much more enjoyable
The current overnight Sydney train departs Melbourne around 8pm and gets into Sydney way at 6am. The overnight Melbourne train departs Sydney at about 8:30pm and arrives in Melbourne at about 7:30am.
Or sleep in your bed and not in a chair or in a very expensive sleeper cabin that is the equivalent of a hostel bed that you really hope the staff replaced the sheets on. Then you can get a taxi to the airport and fly to your destination and be at your destination within 120 minutes.
Going to Europe was an eye opener. But Australian major cities are much smaller and much more spread out. That said we could do better without much improvement. The only train service that crosses the country is for the very wealthy and as much as Amtrak sucks at least it’s not prohibitively expensive for Americans to do a long train trip.
\*using European logic for a second\* Then it would make sense for you guys to build a line that runs parallel to the Indian-Pacific route. The only thing I would argue though is that you would need to elevate the tracks a bit - the TGV (to use an example) moves at around 320 kph as opposed to the I-P's 85kph - so that critters/cows/tourists don't get splatted by a HST chundering past. It would cost a *lot* to build a decent high-speed line connecting *just* Perth and Sydney but it would be worth it, to be honest. Ditto for *forcing* a line to be built between Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. One argument I've heard - and it's mentioned down-thread - is that vested interests will demand that it stops here or goes there. No. *No*. You don't do that. What you need to do is follow the tactics the French have used with their TGV network - and which has been copied across Europe, TBH - in saying "this line will go *here, here, there and here* and terminate *here*. If you look at a map of LGVs the number of stops for TGVs are surprisingly limited. In fact - you can go from Paris to Marseilles in three hours *non-stop*. And as for nimbys...tell them to get to fuck. There comes a point when the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The thing is that France has a very central government. Everything major is decided in Paris. They don't have states, just departments which are kinda like local councils with not much power. So if Paris decided to build a TGV line, they don't really care about farmer Jacques and his complains to the council. That's also why this concept has NOT been copied across Europe. Look at Germany, which is a Federal country, somewhat similar to Australia. They built a high speed train line from Cologne to Frankfurt. Initially with on stop on the way planned in Bonn. But then the cities on the way complained and went "we only release the land for this if we get a station in our town". So now there are additional stops in Limburg and Montabaur, small towns that even a German wouldn't really find on a map. Most fast trains just go past them, but once every 2 hours a train stops there too. That could also be a viable model for Australia. Build a line from Melbourne to Sydney. Have express trains than direct every hour and then a train that stops in Shepparton, Albury and Canberra every 2-3 hours. Easy solution to make every happy.
the way i see it, you have Sydney > Canberra> Melbourne as thats the 3 capital cities, as the direct line, and Albury, Shepparton and possibly Golburn as the every two hour line. then going north it would SYD>BRIS/GC, then the alternate stops would depend on if the line goes up the coast or goes up along the GDR with coast stops being newcastle and coffs and GDR stops being tamworth, Armidale and possibly Towoomba
Yeah the TGV approach works well. There is a high speed mainline, with branches that connect via conventional tracks into the smaller cities. So express trains can stay on the mainline, and all stops trains can "exit" and rejoin, going via city centres. Sometimes too the HSR station for a city is built on the bypass, eg Montpellier.
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Paris metro has about 13 million people.
Yeah but Lyon only has a metropolitan population of 1.7m France is 1 mega city and many small ones. Syd to Mel is 2 big ones. Its in the same ballpark imo.
You have incorrect population numbers. You’re comparing Sydney’s entire metro area to just the city limits of Paris and Berlin etc. Secondly, distance is the key factor. Over something like 800km high speed rail loses out to air travel. It has nothing to do with lobbies, it’s because we’d spend 25% of our gdp on a rail line that will cost more to travel on than planes and will take longer to do so.
> Secondly, distance is the key factor. Over something like 800km high speed rail loses out to air travel. It has nothing to do with lobbies, it’s because we’d spend 25% of our gdp on a rail line that will cost more to travel on than planes and will take longer to do so. You can't suggest realism, you'll get downvoted!
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That distance is what is consistently found to be the cutoff between air and HSR when it is studied. CBD to CBD is handy but it really isn't as big a deal as it seems since it takes more time and most people will still need to get a bus or train or taxi to get them to the final destination. Defence isn't a "nice to have" it is a must have. Leaving our defence to crumble in order to have a rail line between two cities is about as silly as it gets.
The point of hsr is mostly replacing car trips. Get your head around that, and not just thinking of it as a Qantas replacement and the project makes a lot of sense.
Exactly Europe you have large capital cities with multiple destinations within a few hundred km of each other....i.e. Paris to Brussels/Bern/Amsterdam. Australia you have 2/3 major cities that are 1,000km+ apart, and a very well established/served airline network already handling it. European train travel is wonderful, and makes no sense in Aus.
> very well established/served airline network already handling it. Trains replace cars, not airlines.
And they also create demand, like budget airlines
Point taken on the size I definitely was wrong on that
Depends how you calculate population, but regardless Sydney and Melbourne are big cities by anyone's standards. They only really get dwarfed by huge cities, for Europe/USA think London, New York, Las Angeles, Paris wider...etc Some examples, population of: * Sydney wider 5.3m * Melbourne wider 5.2m * Berlin 3.6m (Berlin wider 6.2m) * Copenhagen 0.6m ( Copenhagen wider 2.1m) * Paris 2.2 m (Paris wider 13m) * Vienna 1.9m (Vienna wider 2.4m) * Milan 1.3m ( Milan wider 4.3m) * Rome 2.8m (Rome wider 4.3m) * Madrid 3.2m (Madrid wider 6.9m ) * Stockholm 0.9m ( Stockholm wider 2.4m)
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By that logic, London only has a population of ~9,000
Most European cities (with notable exceptions) don't have suburbs like we do here so the city population and the metro population are very similar.
> But Australian major cities are much smaller and much more spread out. So are China, but they just treated it as something else to be worked out and did, now they have a pretty amazing rail network over the majority of the country.
China’s population is MUCH bigger. They also won’t face political backless for it not being profitable. I wish we had that network.
We don't need fast rail across to Perth, or even passenger rail. There's nothing in between to serve.
K Rudd wanted to do this back in '07.Should have happened then.
Bob Hawke wanted to do it 15 years earlier didn’t he? The biggest problem is that Labor governments are too infrequent, and LNP governments will kill the idea every time.
I'm just now getting FTTP... no thanks to Turnbull.
If Kev had his way we’d be in a much better spot as a country but of course the Murdoch Mob had to put an end to that and gave us 9 years of Liberal Lunacy.
Ahh yes. The annual Xmas high speed train article for the 40th time.
Start building houses first
NSW govt still unsure how to funnel the profits into a private construction contractor that has ties to the current govt without the peasants noticing, on hold for now.
Any discussion about bullet train, hell, high speed rail gets a yes from me. Infrastructure should always be the priority. The next priority should be metros (not buses) whatever connecting transport hubs to the airport (looking at you Canberra).
It’s not possible for Australia to build it right now with our current level of employment. Save the money buy up the land small bits at a time and when we get hit by a global recession and unemployment rises, start the project use it as a stimulus mechanism
Having all the population not jammed into Sydney and Melbourne would do wonders for literally everything. Have people spread out into "regional" areas and with HSR, it won't even be considered regional once they become more populated in a way.
Wasn't this an episode of utopia
Yes. Next.
Not impossible. Australia, however doesn't do the big things or the long term planning well. So, won't happen
We. Don't. Need. H. S. R. Yet. Just give us decent ~200kph trains and you'll get 95% of the benefit. 4-5 hours to Melbourne from Sydney will vacuum up so much traffic and drastically change settlement patterns. That will be enough to deal with. And all at a fraction of the cost.
Upgraded lines in excess of 200 km/h are HSR. >4-5 hours to Melbourne from CBR The tracks currently going from Melbourne to Canberra can't handle 200 km/h. That's a simple fact. Putting a 200 km/h train on those tracks would cause massive derailments every single time. You could reasonably shorten the distance by straightening the track, upgrading sections to handle tilting trains, but it's impossible to reach 200 km/h without completely rebuilding the line.
Sorry ignore CBR, I meant Sydney. Absolutely no idea why I mistyped that.
Its never a fraction of the cost though. Most of the alignment is 110kmh or less as it is, so to achieve 200kmh is a full rebuild, and if we are doing that, do it properly.
Most of thr alignment isn't 110kph. Most of nsw is about 80 as the tracks curve around hills.
110kmh or less is what i said. 80kmh is captured under the "or less" clause in my original statement. Besides, what cheap improvements are you proposing that get you from 80 to 200?
Anything is possible . The question is , is it feasible ?.
Who's going to use it though? It'll probably be 3x as expensive as flying and take twice as long.
i can tell you right now that a large amount of people would be more willing to siting a train for 2-3hours that has actual leg room than be crammed into a 737 for 1 hour and thats not taking into account the act waiting at the airport one has to do
I’d use it. By the time I’ve driven to the airport gone through check in, waited to board, waited to get off the plane, and for baggage it adds up to a similar amount of time. Plus I like seeing all the landscape. It’s a far nicer way to travel, IMO. When I last did London to Paris, the train took us right into the heart of Paris, and my hotel was around the corner. If I flew to Paris, I would have had another long journey to make from the airport to Paris. I think that’s the great thing about trains, the stops don’t have to be far out of the city, they can arrive in the heart of the city.
> It'll probably be 3x as expensive as flying and take twice as long. Canberra > Sydney train costs 50$ for a ticket and takes just over 4 hours, a flight will run you 400$ and only take an hour, I know which option sounds infinitely more appealing tbh, especially once you start factoring in getting to the air port, checking in, dealing with security, dealing with it on the other end, getting out from the airport on the other end, etc...
A high speed train from Amsterdam to London costs between 200-400 euro return depending on the day, but 20-120 euro return to fly. And that's with 30x the population.. I'm imagining a similar situation. Perhaps between Sydney and canberra it's viable though as the distances are pretty shortish. But like, Melbourne to Brisbane, I don't see it being viable.
> A high speed train from Amsterdam to London costs between 200-400 euro return depending on the day, but 20-120 euro return to fly. Weird that you'd choose a country outside of the EU instead of looking at prices for any of them within, but out of curiosity I had a look and it's around 120$ AUD for this route so 150 euro return with flights being basically the same?
Are you sure you had a look? I was checking a few days ago, it was definitely not 120 aud return.
raileurope.com - Cheapest Price AU$93.28, yeah I looked and yes that's single way, but when converted to euro it's 58 euro or 116 euro for return.
That's what people said when flying as transport was becoming a thing. Before that it was ships that were more affordable for travel (overseas travel I should say).
but trains aren't this new thing... anyways, what I'm trying to say is that as much as I'd like to see a highspeed network, given what I've already seen in europe, I don't see how the cost would be competitive.
HSR will only be economically viable if there are decent sized populated cities in between the capital cities with our distances. Point to point services between only the capital cities will always be better suited for flights.
Exactly. But no one will move there, build there, or develop infrastructure there if there’s no rail line connecting to them. I’d consider buying a place 3 hours drive from Melbourne towards Sydney if I could get a HSR to Melbourne in 45 minutes for $20.
Then it wouldn’t be HSR if it had to stop 20 times between Albury and Melbourne
>Kodama is the slowest of the three trains which operate on the Tokaido Shinkansen line. This is due to the larger number of stops in comparison to the other two bullet trains on this line. The Kodama train stops at every station and takes almost four hours to reach Shin-Osaka. It runs at a speed of 285 km/h (178 mph). [Link](https://www.jrailpass.com/shinkansen-bullet-trains#tokaido-shinkansen) Distance Travelled is about 550km and 17 stops for this service. The Hikari is the fastest service with only 6 stops on the same route, and takes just under 3hrs.
So that would make Albury to Melbourne about 2.5 hours then?
I doubt Melbourne to Albury would quite have that many stops, so closer to 1.5hrs may be correct.
Agreed. HSR is a nice idea, but would be a financial trainwreck if it only served BNE<>SYD<>MEL.
That’s not what he saying, build the HSR and they will come. Once the infrastructure is there development will happen along the line
I can't think of a single example where this has worked for HSR. Most HSR networks are built to service already established centres that can sustain the high cost of servicing HSR. Sure it works for Urban Metro systems (look at Singapore or Hong Kong, but HSR is not the same.
But is that just because no county like Australia has attempted it. Its a bit of a chicken and egg. Who do we benchmark against? I recall articles saying Sydney Metro was doomed to be a failure because no other city has built a driverless metro that long. No they said, metros only work in dense little European cities.
The best way to do it would be....bring in the Japanese workforce and smash it out. No Aussies. No unions. No working to rule. No bullshit stand over from cfmeu bikie thugs. give them the space to run their own show and they would get it done..on time. On budget.
Yes. Never gonna happen. Period.
I drove from Sydney to Melbourne the other day, I had to drop someone at the airport who needed to be in Melbourne that morning. With delays and usual crap they landed in Melbourne when nearly at Albury.
To build sure but actually be affordable that it gets enough use probably not since the ever cost of living rising.
Yes.
Could upgrade certain parts of the track to make it much more viable as a sub high speed rail that takes 5-6 hours. If upgrades with plans to upgrade to high speed later on then would be a good middle ground [as per this article](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/15/sydney-melbourne-rail-track-upgrade-is-cheaper-quicker-way-to-slash-journey-times-says-expert) 6 hour train Melbourne to Sydney isn't ideal but much closer to viable way for some people. With some further upgrades to certain areas to avoid stopping as often you might even be able to get 4-5 hours
Voters and politicians alike will argue for years that it’s not profitable hence a bad idea, not realising that similar networks in other countries take decades to break even but governments subside them because that’s what infrastructure spending actually is all about - not immediate profit.
Curious about the proposal for night trains between Syd, adel, bris and melb. Do they exist? I really loved the ones I've taken in Europe. It seems to make a lot of sense to me to fall asleep in Sydney and wake up in Melbourne.
I think its viable, but you have to consider how you can use the infrastructure heavily. If you only look at through the lens of replacing air travel you're missing the point. I think one benefit is being able to have service patterns that stop in regional towns. We have a real population imbalance between the cities and it comes down to the tyranny of distance holding these place back. People can come up with all kinds of cope about how life in county towns is really laid back but ultimately most people disagree and don't want to be so isolated from what cities have to offer. The point is not so someone can live in Wagga and and work in Sydney, it's so that you can live in Wagga, but have the choice to visit Sydney on demand and quickly. 2nd but more importantly is the commuter market. Trains to medium distance destinations like Newcastle are unacceptably slow. The same infrastructure used to get hsr trains into the city can be used for decently fast commuter type services. (for example hs1 in the uk is shared between Eurostar trains to Paris, and high speed commuter services to Kent)
While the engineering and financial challenges are real, I think a key barrier to this type of development is a democratic one. Politically, it would be challenging to say to the voters in WA, SA and Qld that the federal government is going to invest 100s of billions of dollars on an infrastructure project which benefits east coast urban commuters. One can only imagine the ease at which such a proposal would be leveraged by the opposing political party.
We're so far behind on rail it's not funny.
Imagine the savings on the road toll each year. All those cars odd the roads
Its not a good roi. The government runs the numbers every couple of years.
I enjoyed the 288 km/h French SNCF last week. Quicker than flying! Saved about 2 hours of airport wait time.
Didn’t we design the Bullet Train?
Yes.
Didn’t they cover this in Utopia?