Vic Fast Rail

[1990crow]

In the past fortnight, as part of the federal review into construction budget pipeline, the Geelong Fast Rail project has now been cancelled.

For people of Geelong this is a bitter blow.

The Project was however, not an actual fast rail project.

If Australia can't even build an actual fast rail link to Australia's biggest rural city, why are we even bothering with feasibility studies for connections from Melbourne to Brisbane?
The costs will be absurd compared to the little old Geelong connection.

 

[Nuggs Bunny]

In the past fortnight, as part of the federal review into construction budget pipeline, the Geelong Fast Rail project has now been cancelled.

For people of Geelong this is a bitter blow.

The Project was however, not an actual fast rail project.

If Australia can't even build an actual fast rail link to Australia's biggest rural city, why are we even bothering with feasibility studies for connections from Melbourne to Brisbane?
The costs will be absurd compared to the little old Geelong connection.

The business case for Geelong receiving a proper fast rail connection has never been compelling though. There likely aren't enough pax travelling to and from Geelong who would want to pay a premium for a genuine fast rail service and given that the majority of the trip is spent on a shared network with Metro and V/Line trains on the RRLs - the only way fast trains will work is if Geelong trains are completely isolated from the rest of the network. Doing so is possible but very expensive, and the expense is nowhere close to being offset by the additional fares or whatever economic benefits somebody can cook up to justify the project. I think it's clear that Geelong Fast Rail as it's own thing won't stand up because:

• It's expensive - any solution needs to involve dedicated lines directly from Newport or Sunshine to the city because any alternative will mean trains stuck behind Metro and V/line services
• It provides an incremental upgrade to an area that already has a decent rail connection. I would say GFR is a nice to have but well down the list of priorities for Melbourne, particularly when we're tossing up between this and Airport Rail or SRL.
• And I personally doubt that a majority of the people that catch trains between Geelong and Melbourne will want to pay the cost of the service in their fare. If the fare was adjusted to match the investment you'd probably be looking at $30 each way - who is going to pay that 5 times per week?

IMO, the best service Geelong will get will be if they construct MM2 as a link from Southern Cross to Newport, electrify the line and run from Geelong directly from Newport to Southern Cross perhaps with a stop in Werribee for people who want to change to Sunshine or the airport. You'd probably save 10-15 minutes on a single trip even with the stops at Lara etc. But most crucially, this also has other benefits like unclogging the RRLs so extra services can run to Wyndham Vale & Melton, plus the Werribee line trains can run direct to the city without having to go via South Kensington - also adds capacity through the area.

 

[barreness]

Why is everyone in such a rush. Just make slow rail regular, affordable, and electric.

Don't get me started on the indian pacific costs, no I don't want a chef chosen kangaroo tenderloin and a selection of reds from the region.

Ban intracontinential city to city flights, you'll get what you're given

 

[owen87]

Why is everyone in such a rush. Just make slow rail regular, affordable, and electric.

Don't get me started on the indian pacific costs, no I don't want a chef chosen kangaroo tenderloin and a selection of reds from the region.

Ban intracontinential city to city flights, you'll get what you're given

People don't want to spend hours upon hours commuting. Not that complicated.

 

[Todman]

Very fast rail has always been an politician's wet dream. Something fast and shiny.

Look at the mess California has made, Billions spent and incomplete.

 

[FIGJAM]

Very fast rail has always been an politician's wet dream. Something fast and shiny.

Look at the mess California has made, Billions spent and incomplete.

Yep! It makes sense in higher density, relatively level locations such as much of Europe, but not stretched out, lower density areas that have mountains in the way like west coast USA and east coast Australia.

 

[Pakenhamsaint]

It was a half baked idea to begin with.
Sending trains via Werribee again? There's a reason they go via Wyndham Vale

Why is everyone in such a rush. Just make slow rail regular, affordable, and electric.

Don't get me started on the indian pacific costs, no I don't want a chef chosen kangaroo tenderloin and a selection of reds from the region.

Ban intracontinential city to city flights, you'll get what you're given

The Indian Pacific is more a hotel on rails now

 

[barreness]

People don't want to spend hours upon hours commuting. Not that complicated.

Yeh I know, sorry just a rant

Trying to fix a housing affordability issue with an over engineered tech fix, pet peeve

 

[Demonic Ascent]

Yep! It makes sense in higher density, relatively level locations such as much of Europe, but not stretched out, lower density areas that have mountains in the way like west coast USA and east coast Australia.

Japan?

 

[FIGJAM]

Japan?

The fast train lines work around the mountains and on the Shinkanzen lines, we're talking about servicing the better part of 120 million people. Like Europe, they have masses of people using the line just to 'hop on hop off' at various regional centres.

California 39 mill and Australia Melbourne to Brisbane say 15 mill, so there's low density there relative to Japan.

The US train has to do some fancy footwork through a narrow flatter part of the mountains to get to the Central Valley, before running inland through towns like Bakersfield and Fresno, before finally reaching higher population cities like San Jose and the greater San Francisco area. It might make some of those middle towns more attractive from a residential perspective with a fast train, but otherwise I feel it's more a destination line. Will take 2 hours 40 minutes to get to San Fran from LA when a flight is 1 hour 20 and flights are cheap there, so if you're targeting a destination like San Fran or Sacramento (easier way to hit the Napa!) then why not take a flight? Not only have they blown the budget out by points of a trillion dollars (!!!) they have recently revised their ridership estimates down by 25%.

With a proposed line here, again, we might grow some of the areas that it benefits (Seymour, Shep, Albury, Wagga etc.), but for a long time, the only joints people want to go to are the destination spots of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane (maybe Canberra). So if it all goes to plan and squllions of dollars spent, then we can enjoy a 4 hour train trip to Sydney. Or as a self-confessed points whore, I can spend a handful of magic beans on a reward seat, sit at the lounge and get there in just over an hour. Or people can get some cheap ass budget seats. So how much are people going to be willing to pay for the train?

Long term for West Coast US and East Coast Australia, these things might be amazing. Short to medium term however, I would anticipate here exactly what has happened in the US, which are epic cost blow outs and a sudden realisation that the work-experience kid formulating the ridership numbers was a more than a fraction optimistic!

 

[Sttew]

Very fast rail has always been an politician's wet dream. Something fast and shiny.

Look at the mess California has made, Billions spent and incomplete.

But then look at the Shinkansen in Japan. It will be 60 years old in 2024. Kyoto to Osaka is 60km and takes 15 minutes!!

 

[QuietB]

But then look at the Shinkansen in Japan. It will be 60 years old in 2024. Kyoto to Osaka is 60km and takes 15 minutes!!

Those two cities have a population of about 2 million people each, Japan is geographically tiny, and that fast rail links those cities to another 100 million people.

Geelong has a population of 250,000.

 

[Johnny Bananas]

If Australia can't even build an actual fast rail link to Australia's biggest rural city, why are we even bothering with feasibility studies for connections from Melbourne to Brisbane?
The costs will be absurd compared to the little old Geelong connection.

This is a fallacy, because analysis from Japan of HSR vs driving vs planes shows that HSR is only time and cost competitive in distances between 300 km and 1000 km. I'll go find the study if you want. The 80km from Geelong to Melbourne is not within this range. It's commuter rail, not high speed rail.

You can still have commuter rail at 130-150 kph, which would be competitive with car travel even in good traffic, but it's a different value proposition. It'd be more accurate to question, if Victoria can't even electrify the existing railway to Wyndham Vale, why are we even bothering with ideas for faster commuter journeys to Geelong?

 

[Johnny Bananas]

Yep! It makes sense in higher density, relatively level locations such as much of Europe, but not stretched out, lower density areas that have mountains in the way like west coast USA and east coast Australia.

In the context of HSR, density is fundamentally useful as a measure of how many people live in an area inside cities and regions, not across a country, because the stations only need to go where people live. What Australia has is actually better than Europe in some ways, because it's centralised. There are few people living between Sydney and Melbourne compared to within those cities, so there's less of a need for intermediate stops, so the journey from end to end can be faster. There's no need for 20 stops in between. Yes, the distance is long, but that isn't a deal breaker if there are enough people wanting to make the journey.

You can also mostly just go around the mountains between Sydney and Melbourne. The only real mountainous section that has to be crossed is the Picton gap.

So with that in mind, why don't we have HSR in Australia already? Basically Sydney and Melbourne themselves need to be bigger cities. Plus the lack of political will, which is based on short term economic thinking rather than factoring in the long term potential as well as the environmental benefits. Also because grandiose projects (of all types) almost always go ridiculously over budget due to the high cost of land, labour and materials. And also because of the cultural love affair Australians have with their cars, which results in seemingly limitless funding for shiny new highway projects like Westconnex, but government baulking at the cost of transcontinental railways.

 

[Sttew]

The problem as I see it is in the nature of our political system (nothing to do with political parties). Federally a government is elected for 3 years. It spends the first 6 months settling in and the last 12 months coming up with promises to get re-elected. That leaves 18 months to deliver on real things. We could have had a HRS between Geelong and Melbourne decades ago, just as we could/should have had an airport rail link decades ago.

At least in VIC we have four year terms, but when the state government is relying on federal funding...

I Googled Canada, a country not dissimilar to Australia in terms of geography and population spread. It's described on Wikipedia as the "only G7 country that does not have any high speed rail" so Australia is not alone.

 

[QuietB]

In the context of HSR, density is fundamentally useful as a measure of how many people live in an area inside cities and regions, not across a country, because the stations only need to go where people live. What Australia has is actually better than Europe in some ways, because it's centralised. There are few people living between Sydney and Melbourne compared to within those cities, so there's less of a need for intermediate stops, so the journey from end to end can be faster. There's no need for 20 stops in between. Yes, the distance is long, but that isn't a deal breaker if there are enough people wanting to make the journey.

You can also mostly just go around the mountains between Sydney and Melbourne. The only real mountainous section that has to be crossed is the Picton gap.

So with that in mind, why don't we have HSR in Australia already? Basically Sydney and Melbourne themselves need to be bigger cities. Plus the lack of political will, which is based on short term economic thinking rather than factoring in the long term potential as well as the environmental benefits. Also because grandiose projects (of all types) almost always go ridiculously over budget due to the high cost of land, labour and materials. And also because of the cultural love affair Australians have with their cars, which results in seemingly limitless funding for shiny new highway projects like Westconnex, but government baulking at the cost of transcontinental railways.

Density is a huge part of why it does not stack up.

And Japan is a very good example, as is much of Europe.

Due to the pathetic density of Melbourne and relatively poor density of Sydney we simply do not have efficient public transport in each city. Each city is dependent on cars just to access public transport unless you are very fortunate.

This is completely different to a European city or Japanese city which can support amazing public transport because there is high density and people do not rely on cars.

Once you have an excellent public transport system that makes it possible for people to get to the central stations easily and that makes HSR viable.

There are very few houses even close to Geelong railway station. Everyones first move is to get in their cars and as in the USA once we are in our cars we are unlikely to get out.

 

[Nuggs Bunny]

In the context of HSR, density is fundamentally useful as a measure of how many people live in an area inside cities and regions, not across a country, because the stations only need to go where people live. What Australia has is actually better than Europe in some ways, because it's centralised. There are few people living between Sydney and Melbourne compared to within those cities, so there's less of a need for intermediate stops, so the journey from end to end can be faster. There's no need for 20 stops in between. Yes, the distance is long, but that isn't a deal breaker if there are enough people wanting to make the journey.

You can also mostly just go around the mountains between Sydney and Melbourne. The only real mountainous section that has to be crossed is the Picton gap.

So with that in mind, why don't we have HSR in Australia already? Basically Sydney and Melbourne themselves need to be bigger cities. Plus the lack of political will, which is based on short term economic thinking rather than factoring in the long term potential as well as the environmental benefits. Also because grandiose projects (of all types) almost always go ridiculously over budget due to the high cost of land, labour and materials. And also because of the cultural love affair Australians have with their cars, which results in seemingly limitless funding for shiny new highway projects like Westconnex, but government baulking at the cost of transcontinental railways.

Those two cities have a population of about 2 million people each, Japan is geographically tiny, and that fast rail links those cities to another 100 million people.

Geelong has a population of 250,000.

On the contrary, I think Australians have the wrong concept when it comes to high speed rail. Instead of thinking the journey to be catered for is Melbourne to Sydney and the train should be capable of 300km/h like the Eurostar, TGV or Shinkansen, we should be looking for improvements to the regional cities in between and building another tier of service into V/Line or Trainlink to get the sort of mid-level intercity service you get in Europe - something that might only operate at around 200km/h but with enough track and infrastructure improvements that it can consistently run at 200km/h. I've seen a few studies of this to show the cost of of rail goes up nearly exponentially as you increase the design speed from 200km/h up to 300km/h to 350km/h which is not surprising given the rail alignment needs to be very smooth both horizontally and vertically to achieve high speeds.

In terms of patronage, the amount of people who will travel from Melbourne all the way through to Sydney is very few but if you can get the total journey time down to say 6 hours it becomes a more valid alternative for people who are either travelling with a lot of luggage or have an aversion to flying. But the flip side of that is that Melbourne to Albury or Sydney to Canberra may take two hours and give people in those places a valid alternative to driving. People underestimate how much travelling between the regional centres and Melbourne is done because of the smaller populations, but the patronage on those lines is significant and most importantly it's already there. You're using existing customers as a baseline and anymore you win over from airline travel is just a bonus.

 

[Johnny Bananas]

Density is a huge part of why it does not stack up.

And Japan is a very good example, as is much of Europe.

Due to the pathetic density of Melbourne and relatively poor density of Sydney we simply do not have efficient public transport in each city. Each city is dependent on cars just to access public transport unless you are very fortunate.

This is completely different to a European city or Japanese city which can support amazing public transport because there is high density and people do not rely on cars.

This is all true, but I'd say it's more pertinent to transport within each city (metro/commuter rail system) than with HSR. The demand for travel between Sydney and Melbourne is more based on the number of people within each city than density (and also based on the size and interconnectedness of their economies, but the need for business travel should have dropped quite a bit with the advent of teleconferencing).

Once you have an excellent public transport system that makes it possible for people to get to the central stations easily and that makes HSR viable.

To a degree, but I could equally say that airports are stations that can have similar accessibility issues. Yet that doesn't stop Sydney-Melbourne from being the fifth-busiest air route in the world. It certainly puts people more in the habit of choosing rail for journeys.

There are very few houses even close to Geelong railway station. Everyones first move is to get in their cars and as in the USA once we are in our cars we are unlikely to get out.

I agree. It'd take a full cultural change to make HSR truly viable. A larger population can't hurt though.

 

[Johnny Bananas]

On the contrary, I think Australians have the wrong concept when it comes to high speed rail. Instead of thinking the journey to be catered for is Melbourne to Sydney and the train should be capable of 300km/h like the Eurostar, TGV or Shinkansen, we should be looking for improvements to the regional cities in between and building another tier of service into V/Line or Trainlink to get the sort of mid-level intercity service you get in Europe - something that might only operate at around 200km/h but with enough track and infrastructure improvements that it can consistently run at 200km/h.

Governments have tried moving to this model over the last few years. The last NSW government commissioned the McNaughton report on upgrading rail lines to speeds of 200 kph between Sydney and Newcastle, Nowra, Parkes and Canberra. They spent four years and $100m on it. But earlier this year they scrapped the idea.

Why? Well, the report was never released in full, but it seems McNaughton found that the only viable corridor from a patronage perspective was Sydney to Newcastle, and that it's impossible to upgrade the existing track to reach 200 kph for any significant distance. High speeds require very straight track, or you risk a train derailing. But our railway corridors were chosen well over a century ago, and my understanding is they were chosen for low cost rather than speed, so they simply curved around slopes wherever possible, rather than using viaducts and other methods to go straighter. As McNaughton said, "It’s a lovely piece of Victorian [era] engineering, but it’s basically useless."

So an entirely new railway corridor needed to be created. That requires a lot of land acquisition, which is possible (but expensive) in the countryside, but impossible to do in a place like Sydney. So it needed 30km of tunnel just to get out of Sydney, and that doesn't come cheap. Any HSR corridor would encounter the same problem.

McNaughton had future HSR in mind though. His idea was to build this new corridor straight enough for 350 kph operation, but only run 200-250 kph trains on it in the short term. Unfortunately that made it a very expensive proposition, an amount that state governments generally don't have lying around.

One of the fundamental problems with infrastructure in Australia is that states are largely responsible for building it, but the federal government controls most of the tax revenue and the ability to print money. So many transport projects over the last 25 years have been paid for by state governments privatising assets. But what will happen when there are no more valuable assets to privatise?

I've seen a few studies of this to show the cost of of rail goes up nearly exponentially as you increase the design speed from 200km/h up to 300km/h to 350km/h which is not surprising given the rail alignment needs to be very smooth both horizontally and vertically to achieve high speeds.

Do you mind linking any of those studies if you can find them again?

I actually agree with McNaughton's approach. Our existing lines aren't going to get us to 200 kph anyway, so if we have to build a new one, why not build it straight enough for even higher speeds? It doesn't make sense to build a new 200 kph line now and a separate 350 kph line somewhere down the track.

The only real alternative we have is to make marginal track straightening improvements and then run tilting trains down them, which have a lower derailing risk so they can take curves at higher speeds. But they've tried using a tilting train on the coastal line in Queensland (Australia's fastest train actually) and it's done nothing to get people to stop driving or flying, it's just used by tourists.