Greens want to know where the trains are?

beh1972 said :

Lets get on to what is really important…

What brand of model trains are in the photo? That’s not Hornby or Lima track, is it Fleichmann?

The photos are probably ones of the toy train set the Greens have in their city office. Amanda Bresnan wears the conductor’s cap and Shane Rattenbury chains himself to the coal train.

gooterz calculates:
“40,000 Canberrans a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000
40,000 Sydney siders a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000

So for the next 10 years -> $100 Million a year in revenue from passengers alone!

Payback over 15 years.. could be about $2 Billion to spend (if you include freight).

I don’t think you have factored in the cost of rolling stock, running costs (including carbon tax) etc.
If you are looking for a model, do some research on the wages and working conditions of Greek train drivers.

The train station needs to be moved BACK to Civic I think you mean?

http://the-riotact.com/when-the-railways-ran-all-the-way-to-civic/13479

It’s not the population in the cities at each end that’s important, it’s the amount of travel between them. Melbourne-Sydney is widely described as the second busiest air route in the world.

As for the train company going broke, well that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – when they go broke, someone else buys it for a song, and the return on investment no longer has to be as high, therefore prices drop. I think this is what happened with the Channel Tunnel between England and France, or maybe it was the train line that goes through the tunnel.

Although the rail lines to places like Cooma and Captains Flat are unsalvageable, the corridors still exist, and that makes reinstatement much cheaper than starting from scratch. I wouldn’t expect a VFT on these lines, but a slow train linking with a VFT at Canberra would certainly take a lot of traffic off the Monaro Highway in winter!

The space and comfort on a train are just incomparable with planes – check in times, security and check in procedures, all make trains much more attractive, and train stations are usually in city centres, cutting out a lot of travel time to and from airports, for business travel at least. Canberra needs to move its train station to Civic, or nearby, if it’s serious about linking up with a VFT. But don’t wait for a VFT – existing trains would probably get more customers now if the station was central.

IP

2604 said :

gooterz said :

40,000 Canberrans a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000
40,000 Sydney siders a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000

So for the next 10 years -> $100 Million a year in revenue from passengers alone!

Payback over 15 years.. could be about $2 Billion to spend (if you include freight).

Sorry dude, but $100 million a year on an investment of $100bn is a 0.1% return. That’s a rate of return that only makes sense if you’re Stephen Conroy, and one which most people would never want to make if their own money was involved (eg their super).

$100 Billion was for the full network and going into well built up areas.
BRISBANE TO MELBOURNE.is 1945 km.
Canberra to sydney is 280Km so 15% of the distance.
Likely it would include Goulburn so the cost to the ACT would be like $5 Billion if the work was split 3 ways.
Numbers would also go up as air flight becomes more and more expensive, no doubt it will get a carbon/flight tax

gooterz said :

40,000 Canberrans a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000
40,000 Sydney siders a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000

So for the next 10 years -> $100 Million a year in revenue from passengers alone!

Payback over 15 years.. could be about $2 Billion to spend (if you include freight).

Sorry dude, but $100 million a year on an investment of $100bn is a 0.1% return. That’s a rate of return that only makes sense if you’re Stephen Conroy, and one which most people would never want to make if their own money was involved (eg their super).

Lets get on to what is really important…

What brand of model trains are in the photo? That’s not Hornby or Lima track, is it Fleichmann?

Of the 100 Billion quoted for a high speed link from brisbane to melbourne, 90% of the funds went to the last 10 Km of track upto the cities! (much harder to put track where things are in the way)
If you took highspeed rail into sydney CBD and out the other side, you’d have to tunnel it in costing billions!
Canberra will be in the same situation in years to come. Those big tall developements and housing estates are harder to dig under. Its much cheaper to dig a trench/plan around a link than it is to tunnel.

The question is not will it be economical to build it, its a question of how we can afford it as soon as possible. Money will be saved from maintaining the roads, you’d likely be able to cut half the traffic from sydney so spend about half in road repairs and upgrades.

The only real alternatives to rail is nuclear planes or electric cars neither of which anyone would like.
How many people in sydney don’t own a car? Surely the boost in canberra and sydney travel would make it worth it!

The other thing is the freedom to wake up on the day and just make plans i can imagine a lot of shopping trips etc. You can’t do that with a plane if you want to decide on the day you pay the most in airfairs and even then you’d likely have to do it the night before.

40,000 Canberrans a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000
40,000 Sydney siders a year x 10 Trips x 2 Both ways x $70 = $56,000,000

So for the next 10 years -> $100 Million a year in revenue from passengers alone!

Payback over 15 years.. could be about $2 Billion to spend (if you include freight).

That doesnt include the benifit to the local economy from the increased tourism or the decrease in carbon emissions or decrease in noise from the airport.

The election campaign begins

johnboy said :

Or to charge road freight the real cost of road construction and maintenance.

Unfortunately though, since road freight is the only viable option pollies are interested in, they’ll simply pass on the increase in costs to us (in food and parcel costs etc) and it won’t change the amount of trucks on the road – or push a move towards another option. It needs the Govt to be interested in rail too (as no private company could afford to drive the change)…..

Whatever the Gov’s current thoughts on the VFT, every effort must be made to protect a potential rail corridor for whenever the idea does become feasible.

I’d settle for an ordinary train that was as fast as a car.

Oh – and that could carry freight to get those damn trucks off the road.

The problem is we’re both too dispersed and we have a very small population.

One of the arguments I’ve heard was that the Shanghai to Beijing line is about the same distance as Sydney to Brisbane. Of course they forget to mention that each of those cities have similar populations to the whole of Australia.

Or when they want to do a like for like comparison for population they look at the Neatherlands, which has a similar population to Australia (technically only 16m rather than 22m), but contained in a space smaller than Tasmania.

To counter jsm2090, Spain is an area which is a little over half the size of New South Wales, and yet has double the population of Australia. Don’t also forget that Spain has the busiest air route (by aircraft movements) in the world already located in it.

Don’t get me wrong, there is something pretty cool about sitting on a train doing +300km/h (Shanghai Maglev is fun 🙂 But they would need to develop something pretty special, and cheap (to use) to even think about competing with the airlines. Because right now the golden triangle route (Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne, Canberra is sometimes included) can be traveled within an hour or two for often sub $100. A train will have great difficulty beating that.

johnboy said :

Or to charge road freight the real cost of road construction and maintenance.

+1

johnboy said :

Or to charge road freight the real cost of road construction and maintenance.

Exactly. We’re all subsidising the crap out of the road freight industry. The amount of damage done to the road surface by trucks is out of the ball park.. the Department of Transport did some work on establishing how much damage, and from memory the figure was something ridiculous.

Trouble is, much of the rail infrastructure that used to exist has been torn up or built over. Rail lines that did go to regional towns like Captains Flat and Cooma for instance are gone, you see fragments of them, but they’re broken. At some point, our leaders decided to go with truck transport.

In the US, where trucking is even more iconised than it is here, their rail freight system is impressive. I’ve ended up turning the car off and waiting, as trains that seemed a mile long went by. Their railways are well-used for freight, not so much for people-transport outside the cities.

johnboy said :

The rail unions had a lot to do with the rise of road freight.

The problem is that unless you’ve got sender and destination on a rail line you still need two trucks at either end.

At which point it’s just easier to drive the damn truck from end to end.

Spot on johnboy. The Greens are just kidding us that they care about VFTs which they percieve as good for the environment because they can use carbon pollution free electricity (when the wind is blowing). The extent of the Greens’ knowledge of railways is that they wouldn’t know if a train was up them unless the conductor blew his whistle.

johnboy said :

The rail unions had a lot to do with the rise of road freight.

The problem is that unless you’ve got sender and destination on a rail line you still need two trucks at either end.

At which point it’s just easier to drive the damn truck from end to end.

That’s why you need one of those intermodal freight transfer facilities.

The rail unions had a lot to do with the rise of road freight.

The problem is that unless you’ve got sender and destination on a rail line you still need two trucks at either end.

At which point it’s just easier to drive the damn truck from end to end.

What still surprises me is that we have this huge rail network, but we continue to ship things around the country on trucks that use heaps of fuel, do massive damage to the roads and cause more damage to the environment.

Let throw it all on trains and rail freight it around the country and then use trucks to move it locally. Of course it will never happen because the Real ‘Strayns will need to find work elsewhere.

Yet this is not what happened elsewhere. I heard about Spain, for example. There, high speed rail has largely won over domestic air travel.

Also, fuel will be getting more and more expensive for planes – they can’t win for ever. Sooner we get started on the rail the better, I reckon.

You heard incorrectly then because travel by high speed rail in Spain is very expensive as is air travel if you use the national flag carrier. If you use Ryanair or other budget airlines however, it is incredibly cheap to fly anywhere in Europe wherever VFTs operate. While aircraft fuel will inevitably increase in price, the electricity that powers the trains has already risen dramatically in price due to over-investment and subsidisation of renewables (wind and solar)

Richard Bender said :

NoImRight said :

We are just lucky the Snowy Scheme was built in the 50s. It would never happen now.

Why not? The Snowy Mountains Scheme has one big advantage over the fast train project: it was subject to a detailed cost-benefit analysis by the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian governments and found to stack up. Different governments to those then in power may have not given it a high priority and may not have funded it, but at least those that did knew they weren’t blowing taxpayers’ money.

Exactly.

Snowy Mountains Scheme was built back in time when decisions were made on sound economics. Not ideology.

DermottBanana said :

The fast train project wont fly. It’s uneconomical.
How many inquiries and committee reports do we need to tell us when we already know it?
I’m not surprised the ACT Govt has ignored the latest. It wont find anything different to any of the others.

The Airport is behind it. Waaaay back when Snow acquired all that uncontrolled real estate with an airport on it, his initial plan was to utilise the 24-hour capability of the airport to ramp up the freight aspect, plus bringing in international passengers when Sydney was closed, processing the freight and passengers, and then putting it all on the VFT to Sydney.

His people have been doing up very elaborate plans for the work, with the VFT line coming down right next to the airport and a train terminal right outside the passenger terminal.

So Mr Snow is very hopeful that the government shall build him a nice VFT.

Yet this is not what happened elsewhere. I heard about Spain, for example. There, high speed rail has largely won over domestic air travel.

Also, fuel will be getting more and more expensive for planes – they can’t win for ever. Sooner we get started on the rail the better, I reckon.

I would suggest the trains are in cities with suitable population sizes and population densities to justify the cost of having them.

Richard Bender said :

NoImRight said :

We are just lucky the Snowy Scheme was built in the 50s. It would never happen now.

Why not? The Snowy Mountains Scheme has one big advantage over the fast train project: it was subject to a detailed cost-benefit analysis by the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian governments and found to stack up. Different governments to those then in power may have not given it a high priority and may not have funded it, but at least those that did knew they weren’t blowing taxpayers’ money.

Balthazar said :

In the UK they have recently announced that a high speed train link will be built from London to Birmingham, distance about 190 kms. This project is said to cost 33 Billion POUNDS for just less than 200kms of track. Like most projects the costs will blow out. What project of this complexity has ever come in on budget. It’s expected to be up and running by 2026.

Canberra to Sydney is further than 190 kms and you would be looking at closer to $100 Billion.

Do we have that much money to spend on this? We can borrow but should we be carrying so much debt?

The idea of a high speed train is fantastic but in this modern society where there are so many cost demands, unlike in the past, it becomes almost impossible to do these sort of projects.

I think the study they just need is likely to be more accurate. It says:

“The risk-adjusted cost estimate for the implementation of an overall HSR network would fall within the range of $61 billion to $108 billion (in $2011) depending upon the combination of corridors selected, reflecting the level of confidence for this phase of the study.”

That’s for the entire east coast network. For Canberra to Sydney it says between $11 billion and $24.5 billion.

Still could blow out etc, and it’s still heaps of money. But probably closer to the mark than your guess based on the UK’s project.

Richard Bender said :

NoImRight said :

We are just lucky the Snowy Scheme was built in the 50s. It would never happen now.

Why not? The Snowy Mountains Scheme has one big advantage over the fast train project: it was subject to a detailed cost-benefit analysis by the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian governments and found to stack up. Different governments to those then in power may have not given it a high priority and may not have funded it, but at least those that did knew they weren’t blowing taxpayers’ money.

Thanks Captain Outofcontext.

NoImRight said :

We are just lucky the Snowy Scheme was built in the 50s. It would never happen now.

Why not? The Snowy Mountains Scheme has one big advantage over the fast train project: it was subject to a detailed cost-benefit analysis by the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian governments and found to stack up. Different governments to those then in power may have not given it a high priority and may not have funded it, but at least those that did knew they weren’t blowing taxpayers’ money.

In the UK they have recently announced that a high speed train link will be built from London to Birmingham, distance about 190 kms. This project is said to cost 33 Billion POUNDS for just less than 200kms of track. Like most projects the costs will blow out. What project of this complexity has ever come in on budget. It’s expected to be up and running by 2026.

Canberra to Sydney is further than 190 kms and you would be looking at closer to $100 Billion.

Do we have that much money to spend on this? We can borrow but should we be carrying so much debt?

The idea of a high speed train is fantastic but in this modern society where there are so many cost demands, unlike in the past, it becomes almost impossible to do these sort of projects.

Trains are super. Looking at the picture makes me ask why I cant commute in Fireball XL5 but thats a whole different question.

Hopefully there is a Rooly Fast Train in our future but I cant see it happening for a long time.Governments of every colour are scared of spending any money as sooner or late an Opposition or angry member of the public will raise a poo storm over Government waste. Sadly it seems a VFT is more of a Shelbyville idea.

We are just lucky the Snowy Scheme was built in the 50s. It would never happen now.

DermottBanana said :

Build a fast railway network between the Australian capitals, and the airlines will drop their fares to compete. Until it goes broke because it’s got a massive debt incurred to build the infrastructure.
Once it goes broke, airlines shoot fares back up, and screw us all over.
.

Yet this is not what happened elsewhere. I heard about Spain, for example. There, high speed rail has largely won over domestic air travel.

Also, fuel will be getting more and more expensive for planes – they can’t win for ever. Sooner we get started on the rail the better, I reckon.

Build a fast railway network between the Australian capitals, and the airlines will drop their fares to compete. Until it goes broke because it’s got a massive debt incurred to build the infrastructure.
Once it goes broke, airlines shoot fares back up, and screw us all over.
That’s why it wont work – because there are vested interests which will sink it.
Personally, I hate flying, and enjoy train travel. But I looked recently at the prices of travel between Sydney & Brisbane. Rail is more expensive, slower, and despite being a 14-hour overnight trip, lacks sleeper facilities (unless I want to pay four times the airfare, instead of twice the airfare). On the Canberra run, the price is equally stupid, in that I could drive to Sydney & back costing less in fuel than if I took a train one-way, and if I drove, I could take 2-3 people with me, and have the convenience of a car at the other end.
Australia lacks the population density for such projects to work. Britain has three times our population in a landmass the size of Victoria. Japan’s density’s even higher.
It’s a simple equation, and one we’re not gunna change in our lifetimes.
So should our government be holding inquiry after inquiry to ask the same questions?
And should the tin-pot city council here be devoting resources to such an inquiry?
Yeah, the ACT government might have no interest in that inquiry. But considering how much we belly-ache around these parts about some things they do waste their (our?) money on, they’ve picked the right path with this one.

I partly agree with DermottBanana. Rail is critical in densely populated cities like Sydney, with poor roads choked up by freight trucks (I seem to remember reading that 70% of all discharged sea cargo at Port Botany never leaves the greater Sydney region) but probably isn’t viable here in the forseeable future.

I believe that the Spanish Madrid-Seville train route is similar in distance and population to our Syd-Cbr-Mel, and operates freight and high-speed passenger trains profitably, but for this to work here fuel will need to at least double in price, and we will need to live in higher density urban environments.

The above picture is about as close as we’ll be getting to fast rail any time soon.

(Cue the Greens: “What is this, a train for ants?!?!”)

Asking the public where they would like a fast train station would be a great idea Amanda. The constructive and useful feedback that is likely to be received is that there should at least be a station in every suburb similar to the expectation that ACTION should have a bus stop in front of everyone’s front door in case people want to catch a bus occasionally.

In the event that there was ever a fast train to Canberra, there should only be one stop so as to not delay the train journey too much and then it is likley to be under utilised as a fair proportion of ACT residents would probably not make the effort to travel to the station.

Boarding…….

winter said :

What about a fast rail between Canberra and Sydney? Pretty flat open country alot of the way should make it pretty cheap. I guess it might pull alot of business away from the airport though so whatever kickbacks they are getting from there might fall through.

Probably, I would HSR over air travel any day given the hassle of borading.

DermottBanana said :

The fast train project wont fly

Of course not! It’s a train.

What about a fast rail between Canberra and Sydney? Pretty flat open country alot of the way should make it pretty cheap. I guess it might pull alot of business away from the airport though so whatever kickbacks they are getting from there might fall through.

The fast train project wont fly. It’s uneconomical.
How many inquiries and committee reports do we need to tell us when we already know it?
I’m not surprised the ACT Govt has ignored the latest. It wont find anything different to any of the others.