The possibility of one or more Very Fast Train (VFT) lines for Australia has been debated for more than 40 years, most often being treated as a complete joke. However, perhaps that’s about to change.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has long been a supporter of VFT transport for Australia, and his government is now putting its money where its mouth is. As this article in The Conversation notes:
The Albanese government set up the High Speed Rail Authority in 2022. It also committed A$500 million to plan and protect a high-speed rail corridor between Sydney and Newcastle. This corridor was prioritised due to significant capacity constraints on the existing line, among other reasons.
The ultimate plan is for a high-speed rail network to connect Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and regional communities across the east coast. The network would help Australia in its urgent task to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. These continue to increase even as emissions from other sectors fall.
The main reason why people have derided the possibility of VFT is that they argue that Australia’s population density is too low. However, the reality is that the population of the Sydney/Canberra/Melbourne region is about 15.5 million. Sydney (including Newcastle, Wollongong and the Blue Mountains) has a population of about 6.1 million people while Melbourne (including Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo) has a population of about 5.9 million.
By comparison, the region serviced by the Paris to Marseille VFT line is almost exactly the same, if not less. The Greater Paris region has a population of about 11.3 million, while the Marseille region (including Aix-en-Provence and Nice) has a population of 1.83 million.
The Sydney to Melbourne air route is the fifth busiest in the world.
If we look at travel times, Sydney to Melbourne by air takes about 90 minutes, but loading and unloading luggage and travel between the airport and the respective CBDs takes around 40 minutes in each case, making a total of 170 minutes. By comparison, VFT would travel from CBD to CBD direct (between Southern Cross Station in Melbourne and Central Station in Sydney). Projections indicate that this would take approximately 165 minutes i.e. almost exactly the same as covering the journey by air.
As mentioned above, VFT plans also propose in the long-term to link Sydney and Brisbane (with the Sydney-Newcastle leg being the first one off the mark – even before any part of the Sydney-Melbourne line). The Greater Brisbane region (including the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast) has a population of approximately 3.65 million people. Like Sydney to Melbourne, VFT travel from Sydney to Brisbane would take about three hours (180 minutes).
By comparison, a flight from Sydney to Brisbane also takes about 90 minutes, and again we are talking about 30-40 minutes for travel between the respective airports and CBDs. Thus, as for Sydney to Melbourne, the total journey time for air travel is almost exactly the same as by Very Fast Train.
In addition to the fact that the journey times are almost exactly the same, the major reason for looking very seriously at VFT travel is a substantial saving on greenhouse gas emissions. As the link in the above extract from an article in The Conversation indicates, facilitating the construction of VFT lines is a key part of the Albanese government’s strategy for cutting Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is currently no viable method of moving to electrically powered jet aeroplanes, whereas most if not all VFT lines in the world are already electrically powered.
In my view a strong case can be made for modest subsidies for both construction and operation of VFT lines joining Australia’s major East Coast centres.
Can Australia afford to construct VFT rail lines? A better question is whether we can afford NOT to do so. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China and Japan all have VFT. On some measures Australians are the wealthiest people in the world. However, population numbers tell a very different story. Australia currently has a population of 27 million, whereas Germany has 84 million, France 66 million, Italy 59 million and Spain 48 million. On the other hand, Australia’s population is growing at 2.5% annually whereas Germany is growing at 0.8%, France 0.3%, Italy -0.3% and Spain 1.2%. That comparison indicates that we should hasten slowly on developing a VFT network.
I like the idea of connecting smaller cities in Aus (if it can be done at a reasonable cost), as this might actually be doable, unlike longer routes. However, a better route would be to connect Melbourne and Geelong, as the population growth is higher in Melbourne than Sydney, and people might already want to actually move to Newcastle without a VFT as it is a far nicer place than Geelong.
I think there are two obvious problems connecting longer routes. One is that the airlines and other interest groups will do everything to stop them. In France, when they create a new line or fix up a route (which they did with Marseille-Paris a few years ago just to make a bit faster), you don’t have this problem because the hard routes are already all there and no-one in their right mind would take the plane if they could take the train. So making it better didn’t change demand for planes much. Most of the lines were also built before Air France was privatized.
The other problem is that if you want them to be reasonably fast on shorter routes they will need to go to the middle of the city (i.e., need tunnels). As people learnt in Victoria, this is immensely expensive. In this respect, Marseille-Paris was constructed in 1966 when there was less population and thus less troubles. The French public are also willing to trade-off car travel for better trains, so you can get better public support for trains. This is one reason the roads are the most expensive in the world (you basically pay tolls everywhere). If you wanted to choose transport options like this in Aus, you would get voted out if you offered better trains for roads.
Re Canberra to Sydney
the train line from about say MossVale into Sydney would need to be duplicated, there are already too many trains ,some of which are slow local or freight trains for just one track north and one track south to cope with.
If that was done then a train averaging just 120 kh would do the southern highlands to central in less than one hour.
Agree about tunneling.
BTW
And if we get to EVs that, are truly autonomous selfsteering, then the whole picture changes .. why do passenger trains at all ?
On reflection re passenger transport,if selfsteering Ai vehicles do prove to be real, why should we continue to lay steel rails etc for passenger transport ?
Self driving cars are not mass transport. Because each one takes up a lot of room and needs somewhere to park. (And yes it does need to park else it is still congesting roads but with no reason because no passenger)
If they are selfsteering taxis or minibuses after dropping you off at your destination they would head for the next customer.
Because very fast trains (unlike Victoria’s “fast” trains) go at 330 kph. So if you want to go from Melbourne to Sydney, it would be perhaps 3:45 (based on being slightly longer than Marseille-Paris) vs. sitting in your car for 9 hours.
One interesting issue that also comes up is how much you want the train to stop between the routes. In France, many people now commute from the satellite cities around Paris — because if you live 100 ks away, it’s only 30 minutes plus whatever it takes you to get to work from the station which is easy in Paris (that amount of time would be far better than driving to work from the Burbs in Sydney and Melbourne).
An issue that then comes up is how much you want your trains to stop between the major destinations. If you have Melbourne-Sydney, there will be political pressure to stop here, there and everywhere in between, so suddenly your journey goes from 3:45 to 4:45 hours and taking the plane from Melbourne-Sydney doesn’t seem so bad after all. The main way around this is more tracks and hence more cost. That’s a reason Geelong-Melbourne is favourable than Sydney-Newcastle. With Geelong-Melbourne, there is no great point stopping in between. With Sydney-Newcastle, if you wanted to build to Brisbane, you now have 10 minutes more delay (then add a few more cities along the way… and you are making it easier to fly again).
After all the studies, do we have any elements of a preferred route? If we do, we should be reserving them.