High-Speed Rail for Australia: Is it Impossible?

Thanks for having me on the show Reece!

We’re spending $360bn on nuclear submarines instead

That route is at about the upper limit of length on HSR before flying becomes clearly better (900ish km where 1000km is generally considered the viable upper limit of a HSR route). Honestly why not move a future HSR route a bit more south so that it passes through Canberra without a spur line? You'd need to get the travel time down into the 5 hour range or less to make it appealing, and it needs to be cheaper than air travel and comparable to what you'd spend on fuel driving that distance, and it's about an 8.5hr drive. You also factor in Australias demographic crisis which eliminates any case for HSR, no point in massive new infrastructure projects when you're birth rates are flat and your population is declining. Money that could be spent on infrastructure in the short term may be better spent bribing people to have babies.

The current service could be quicker if it was dual track and if the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) that controls the track didn't favour freight trains over passenger services.

The current XPT fleet is not far off replacement and the replacement units apparently will NOT be set up with sleeper cabins.

Governments change, both state and federal. Makes long term planning so difficulty these days. Not like Snowy Mountains Scheme days. Just look at the collapse of HS2.

The conversation around HSR in Australia is increasingly moving away from linking Sydney and Melbourne (and maybe Brisbane) with a full scale HSR and more towards more local region focused HSR,(or at least services capable of consistently running 160km/h+/Very Fast Trains), designed to better improve the links between the towns immediately surrounding the capitals rather then linking the capitals themselves.

Australia's HSR saga is a clear case of why it's important to remember that you build infrastructure to solve transport problems, as more often then not the HSR case in Australia feels like a transport solution looking for a problem. The HSR proposal typically presented is usually the huge task of linking Melbourne and Sydney, focused on the benefits of such a link against air travel, when in reality the current flight situation isn't really struggling (climate concerns aside). Despite the busy air route, it is usually presented as a solution to future urban development issues, as a means to basically export the demand for housing in the capitals out to the regions. These HSR proposals are typically dependent on changing development patterns across regional Australia. However there are different ways to solve the urban development problems these HSR proposals highlight that have different consequences in comparison to HSR. The important takeaway though is that there are multiple ways Australia can tackle the sort of problems HSR is presented as a solution too, and increasingly it seems that a stronger focus on more basic fundamentals is taking centre stage over the idea of a large HSR system.

To put it as succinctly as possible, the East coast capital linking HSR concept is typically presented as an attempt to export growing development pressures, primarily in housing, out of the capital regions and into rural regions. Essentially building a Melbourne to Sydney HSR is a commitment to promoting huge amounts of urban development in regional Australia instead of in existing urban Australia. This is already a loaded option that isn't inherently good or bad, but it runs into the issue that our capitals aren't exactly over-developed to begin with, and that there are a lot of more local projects that could be done to alleviate the development pressures in our capitals. There are also major consequences to dumping the residential overflows of the capitals on regional Australia. Such a system would be built on the concept of living in rural communities and commuting the the capitals for business, which has risk of further draining business investment out of the rural communities. This is in contrast to the concept of more self-contained communities, where people live and work within a smaller local area. Essentially, the inter-capital HSR would be inflating the populations of regional towns well beyond what would occur otherwise, largely so that an inner city suburb in Melbourne doesn't have to have as many apartment blocks as it otherwise would (we'll come back to this). It's not inherently right or wrong to go down that path. It's a strategic planning decision. Bigger regional towns have their pros, but its not always an easy sell for the established communities.

The sticking point for the capital linking HSR concept is that we do have other options for easing the development demands on our capital regions. The two big ones being a focus on more immediately surrounding areas for better transport links and increased development, and the other being a stronger push to promote a more denser urban environment in the capitals themselves.

We have existing inter-city services that serve the more immediate surrounds of the capital regions, with a lot of scope for improvement. Sydney already has regular rail services between Newcastle, Norwa and Lithgow, representing towns about 150km out in each direction with reasonably consistent established urban area in between them. This represents an urban footprint already very much tied to Sydney with a lot of potential for internal development. A train to Newcastle currently takes about 2 and a half hrs. There is a huge scope for improvement there. Services that could run to the stations already served by the regional network, maintaining an average speed of at least 100km/h would be a game changer for urban development in the boarder Sydney Basin region. You'd still be exporting housing needs to neighbouring towns, but the effect is much more contained.

And then of course there is the option to just properly densify our capitals as is. When all is said and done, for all our housing shortfall drama, we're still extremely low in terms of population density. A lot more could be done to promote denser development within Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane as is (including improvements to the PT networks). Australian cities are increasingly reaching a point where their growth is clashing with the 'Australian dream'. We're at a point where we need to accept as a society that not everyone is going to grow up and live in a detached house with a backyard and pool, and frankly, we aren't handling that super well. Many inner city suburbs in the capitals are still predominantly dethatched single household dwellings. These are areas that are prime for higher density development, and the existing residents typically fight against it to an extreme degree (which is understandable, but not ideal from a bigger picture perspective). In many ways the push for HSR can be perceived as a push to 'spare' these suburbs from that densification. If there is a train to ship in and out the workers from towns 100s of km away then there is no need to build apartments in the leafy inner city suburbs! That is a big part of what HSR proposals in Australia represent, an alternative to the ongoing densification of our capitals.

Basically, a full HSR from Sydney to Melbourne is a huge leap that involves a very firm commitment to how we want the country to look over the next century. In contrast, improving more local rail networks can achieve similar overall outcomes without such firm commitment, while just changing how we manage the existing urban spaces in the capitals would go a long way. Building a 'Very Fast Train' from Sydney to Canberra would be significantly more achievable then a HSR from Sydney to Melbourne and likely have all the same benefits for those living along that corridor. Likewise, getting the Melbourne to Albury service that currently exist running at least 1 tph (as opposed to the current 5ish return services a day) with an average speed above the 120km/h mark (which the current rollingstock is very much capable of), would likely have all the same benefits as HSR for those living along that corridor. Both could also become building blocks for a HSR link between Sydney and Melbourne down the line.

Every time HSR becomes a major talking point in Australia, it is usually in the form of a 1000km+ long system that just isn't going to happen due to the sheer scale and specific-ness of it. It's far too much in one go and doesn't provide us with much of anything we couldn't achieve with smaller, more practical projects. Which is why the conversation has moved increasingly away from having a HSR link between Melbourne and Sydney and more towards getting our existing inter-city links up to a better standard. If we're going to get HSR in Australia it'll take the form of something like Newcastle – Sydney, Melbourne – Geelong etc long before it does Melbourne – Sydney. The existing intra-state networks need to be the backbone of such a system, rather then a focus on linking the capitals.

Not going to happen under our current political system. The airline and road lobbies are very powerful. The election cycle makes long term projects like this very difficult to implement.

Realistically it is not feasible as it will cost up to 200 billion and the current federal government is not known be good at managing finances. The other problem is there is nothing in between Melbourne and Sydney except Canberra. Think California HSR but even worse , no Fresno, Merced Burbank etc. A higher speed line from Sydney to Canberra and north to Gosford is the most likely solution for now
On the point regarding environment and emissions. Australia is actually very clean and has negligible impact on the so called environmental crisis. The real culprits are welll…you know who

"Tell them they are dreaming". Light rail from Parramatta is about to be delivered to the former Carlingford Station. About 4 km away at Epping is the main northern heavy rail suburban and regional line to Newcastle as well as the new Northwest Metro. Connecting the light rail and the 12 trains an hour services to the CBD would connect major population centres to Macquarie University and high tech and research employers at Macquarie Park.

Officialdom refuses to commit to closing this important missing link in the Sydney network. But they have just upgraded the bike path!

High speed rail, also known locally as the VFT (very fast train) will never happen in Australia. The country is far too big and the population far too small to make it economical. The Intercity XPT – an Australian-made version of the British Intercity 125 can travel at 200km/h but the rail lines in the eastern states cannot handle those speeds for a number of reasons – the most expensive being that the major population centres of Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle and Brisbane have mountain ranges between them, making straight rail alignments almost impossible to construct.

Tunnels are not an option outside the capital cities because it is too expensive to build them for the sake of a few trains per day at the very most. Sydney's 1920s-1930s undeground has a train running through every 40 seconds in peak, across three lines thus making tunnels economical.

Far from being a railway nation, Australia is an airways nation. The route between Sydney and Melbourne is one of the world's busiest and flights are cheap most of the time, especially when the smaller airlines drop their prices. I'd love to see more trains but it is just not viable with the current population.

Fanning out from the bigger cities would make sense…

But you could be building on aboriginal land & what will that bring of headaches?

A study should be done to explain why no English-speaking country can build high-speed trains. 😅

Thank you for your video. The committment the federal government has to the fuel and road transport lobbies is a major issue. The vested interests will derail any attempt to improve the speed or efficiency of the rail system. Even when Perth decided to build an underground station the political opponents asked where are you going to find tunnellers in Western Australia! Then you have the nimby sector. I only wish we had a politician with vision and the ability to build something with a cycle time of less than a term in office.

Five words to explain why Australia won’t get High Speed Rail:

Qantas does not want it.

All of the English-speaking Nations in general seem to struggle with implementing their own, national high-speed rail corridors – perhaps one thing they do have in common regarding rail transport (not to mention they do seem more car-centric than many other countries around the world). Australia, New Zealand, Canada & South Africa don't have any high speed rail lines as yet, the USA is struggling to build one in California and the only one which could be likely to get built & opened first is a private high speed line (Brightline West) from the outskirts of Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and the UK can't seem to easily get high speed rail beyond London & Birmingham not to mention its only proper high speed line is an international line (Eurostar) between France & London. Really does make we wonder why countries where English is dominant seems to struggle so badly to add & expand high speed rail infrastructure compared to countries like France, Germany, Italy, China & Japan.

I don’t know how you are going to take 2.5 hours off Albury to Melbourne. The current trip takes 3:19. You are suggesting that you could reduce it from 3:19 to 0:49?? That’s 330km including the approach into Melbourne at an average of over 400km/h.

The biggest issues are Goulburn to Sydney and Seymour to Melbourne. However, once you reach the edge of the cities, the rail infrastructure is pretty good, so you probably can just use them, The biggest issue with Australia is that the most populated areas are on the Eastern coast, which is also the most mountainous.

Meanwhile in Tasmania.

If its possible in China then Australia, US and Canada have no excuse

This vid was going great and then you had to go and bring in Canberra 😉 Other than that, yep it's such a missed opportunity of Sydney to Melbourne (where I live)

Absolutely agree with you on the climate crisis. Especially in Australia, where they are on the extremes of climate change. Thankfully they do have a more progressive government now, so there is more chance they will act. Really, high speed rail is not just desirable it’s essential for Australia

It is ironic that you start the video by mentioning the ABC Show, Utopia. In the episode on HSR, they can't find a single expert to support the proposal, yet they still put it out there for political reasons knowing full well that it is complete and BS. Whilst the cost is a big issue, the bigger issue is lack of benefits. Recent studies show them as being very very hard to identify. At the moment you can fly from Sydney to Melbourne for under US$65 with zero subsidy from taxpayers. The idea that you would spend $100 billion or more on a single railway line and then subsidise the operation when you can achieve better or similar door to door travel times without taxpayer funding is just nuts. If you have a spare $100 billion to spend on transport, you could build 10 or more metros in the large cities which will benefit millions of people every day, ease the housing crisis, improve liveability in the cities and do all the things that RM Transit stand for. As for climate change issues, there are literally hundreds of initiatives you would adopt before you built high speed rail to reduce emissions. Australia could completely decarbonise their power grid for a fraction of the cost of HSR. With the spare change, you could build more electrified freight lines and subsidise electric cars. As for building an early section from Albury to Goulburn first, no rationale government would spend tens of billions of dollars on the section of track that delivers the lowest benefits of an already very low benefit proposal. Sheep don't catch trains. You wouldn't spend $50 billion on hospitals in rural areas that are only used at 5% compacity whilst people in the city are waiting years to get a hospital bed. Likewise, you wouldn't build an isolated HSR line in the middle of what is sheep country that a handful of people are using when millions are suffering every day from lack of public transport in the cities. The only part that makes sense is to build HSR around the main cities. Melbourne has already started this with higher speed rail to Geelong and Ballarat and Sydney is in early planning stages to get lines to places like Newcastle down to about an hour. Like metros, they would deliver actual benefits to actual people and the economy. They can be built in such a way that in the future, maybe 2075, they could be linked to longer HSR lines but to do that now is simple irresponsible. The arguments fall apart as soon as you put numbers into the calculations. It simply doesn't stack up.

It’s never claimed to be High Speed… It’s a CountryLink train not High Speed

You keep saying it will be cheap.
the current state government in Victoria does not do anything cheap, if it can be clad in gold, it will shine