According to a comprehensive new study of high-speed rail along Australia’s east coast it could be $30 billion cheaper than first thought and repay its costs entirely within 40 years.
The rail debate is back on track; with Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government saying it will speak to the states about the project and protect a future corridor for the network.
The Melbourne-Sydney flight route is the fifth busiest in the world and for decades governments have been discussing high-speed rail as a solution to ease the pressure on airports.
Environmental think-tank group Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE) and the German aerospace centre have studied the situation and produced a model of a 1799-kilometre route, linking Brisbane with Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
According to the group’s timetable, it showed the journey between Sydney and Melbourne would take two hours and 55 minutes, while Sydney to Canberra would take about an hour.
It proposes peak speeds of 350 kilometres per hour.
The BZE report puts the capital costs of the network at $84 billion, compared to $114 billion estimated from the previous Labor government’s high-speed rail study.
A previous BZE study also found that the costs had been over-estimated.
“It’s a lot cheaper to run and a lot cheaper to build because of the reduction in tunnelling and bridge-building that’s required in the route we’ve selected,” BZE’s chief executive Dr Stephen Bygrave told the ABC TV program Lateline.
Researcher Gerard Drew said the group’s proposed alignment has 44 per cent fewer tunnels and 25 per cent fewer bridges.
The German aerospace centre, known as Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V (DLR), is the country’s national centre for aerospace, energy and transportation research.
It has used Australia as a case study for building a next-generation rail network.
DLR’s Dr Simone Ehrenberger said it was more than just plotting points on a map.
“We did a quite detailed calculation of the actual routes of where the tracks are going within cities,” she said.
“We considered the exact city access to the stations.”
The man in charge of the country’s project to build a next-generation train, Dr Joachim Winter, has thrown his support behind an east coast high-speed rail network in Australia.
“We think it’s perfect because you have a concentration of large cities, but not so many people scattered around as Germany,” he said.
He says Australia is in a great position to be building the network because it is virtually starting from scratch.
“To construct a high-speed railway is expensive, but it’s not difficult because most of the problems have been understood,” he said.
“Australia is a follower and in a better position than Germany had when we started to run this without knowing everything about the consequences.”
The European support has not just come from train researchers.
Senior officials such as the European Commission’s deputy head of cabinet for transport, Keir Fitch, believe Australia should get on board as well.
Mr Fitch said it would be a smart decision for the east coast.
“You need to of course do the analysis properly, but where you’ve got passenger flows like the ones between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane then it should make sense,” he said.
“Rail, particularly for densely populated areas has great benefits in that you can move people in and out of cities quickly and efficiently on it.
“You provide something which, all the experience we’ve had shows, is much more attractively certainly for getting people out of planes to trains, freeing up air capacity or simply reducing carbon emissions.
“You’re not going to be able to do any of that with a road,” Mr Fitch add
One Response
It’s never going to be cheaper to do the job than NOW!
I’ve travelled on high speed trains in France, Germany, Tibet, China and Russia and they are the way to go – fast, clean, efficient, comfortable and great value for money.
If intelligently designed, they will have terminus points at local transport hubs so passenges can seamlessly move on to their next point in their journey.
The time for talking is well past. Its shovel time!