Rail transport High-speed trains to nowhere: Australia's long-running rail fail Ambitious high-speed links between capital cities have been proposed for decades, but never built. Are shorter regional routes a better way forward? * Australia’s latest high-speed rail dream leaves a bitter taste Anne Davies -- Image from Rail Projects Victoria video, Victoria, Australia. It may well be that states will drive the push to faster rail, if not high-speed rail. [ ] Image from Rail Projects Victoria video, Victoria, Australia. It may well be that states will drive the push to faster rail, if not high-speed rail. Photograph: Rail Projects Victoria “Australia is the only continent on the planet, other than Antarctica, that does not have high-speed rail,” says the former managing director of Hitachi Consulting, Gary Fisher. Hitachi has been involved in high-speed rail since it was introduced into Japan in the 1960s and Fisher has been one of the principal enthusiasts for an Australian project. Australian politicians have been talking about it for almost as long, yet high-speed rail (above 250km/h) or even fast rail (above 200km/h) still seem a distant pipe dream. The University of Wollongong academic Philip Laird calculates $125m in today’s dollars has been spent on high speed rail investigations, but not one kilometre of corridor has been reserved. “High-speed rail has often been promised, often before elections (a Melbourne-Geelong service is the latest one) only to vanish afterwards,” he says. Travel times anticipated in the federal government’s 2011 report on high-speed rail. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Travel times anticipated in the federal government’s 2011 report on high-speed rail. Photograph: High Speed Rail Study A lack of vision and political will, short-termism, genuine concerns -- unliveable. “One of the problems with high-speed rail, for too long it was seen as a method of getting from Sydney to Melbourne as an alternative to flying,” says the Liberal MP John Alexander, who has chaired several inquiries into the future of cities and is now an evangelist for high-speed rail. “The real problem we are trying to address is housing supply and -- the city has expanded. California scales back plan for high-speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco -- for close to $3m. With high-speed rail, he says, “Gosford, the southern highlands and Wollongong could be 15 minutes from the centre of Sydney and Newcastle, Goulburn and Nowra 30 minutes”. -- Australia could follow the lead of Germany ... in building sections of track to high-speed standards, one at a time Philip Laird, University of Wollongong The deregulation of the airline industry, which has slashed airfares, also helped undermine the economics of Melbourne to Sydney high-speed rail. Sydney to Melbourne is now the world’s second busiest domestic air route, with 54,519 flights a year and the airlines have become -- Since the failure of the VFT project there have periodic attempts to revive the concept. The latest was between 2010 and 2013 when the former Labor government produced a two-stage report on high-speed rail between Brisbane and Melbourne. It went nowhere. In 2017 the Morrison/Turnbull government embarked on the latest attempt to explore either fast rail or high-speed rail by allocating $20m to fund business cases for such schemes. They include studies for high-speed rail between Melbourne and Shepparton, which is being proposed by a private sector consortium, and two fast-rail projects: Sydney to Newcastle and Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast. The latter two have state involvement. China's new high-speed train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou Read more -- Land and Rail Australia, that won funding for the Melbourne-Shepparton business case and which has designs on a much grander plan: a high-speed line between Melbourne and Sydney funded by eight new cities along the route. -- was established on 1 July, but so far it has only an acting chief executive, Malcolm Southwell from the Department of Infrastructure. There is no expert committee yet, so no one is moving at high speed to get these projects rolling. -- It may well be that states will drive the push to faster rail, if not high-speed rail. Laird says Victoria is the most advanced, and there is a good case for pursuing the more modest goal, given the difficulties of making progress on high-speed rail. “Australia could follow the lead of Germany and other countries in building isolated new sections of track to high-speed standards, one at a time. These sections can link with existing mainlines, to allow for new trains to run faster than cars,” he says. -- Traralgon in the Latrobe Valley. HS2 would widen UK north-south divide and should be axed, says report Read more -- The NSW government has retained Prof Andrew MacNaughton, who has worked on the UK’s hugely controversial HS2 project, to advise on options for high-speed rail or track upgrades to enable faster rail. The study involves main lines from Sydney to Newcastle, Orange, -- Sydney-Melbourne line, the very fast train has every chance of going metaphorically off the rails once again. A good start would be to reserve the critical rail corridors that will be needed for high-speed lines. • Next: the former politicians who see profit in high-speed rail Topics