Fred, a second airport for Sydney would be a wste of money.
By the time it is finished it will not be needed.
Airlines will be one of the first casualties of the transition economy.

Rhian, the days of subsidising railways has ended in most countries
and in the US rail freight is increasing quite strongly despite, or
because, of the economic conditions. Trailers on trucks is common
practise overseas with sleeping cars for truck drivers on the same train.

Unfortunately I think our loading gauge between Sydney and Parkes is
not high enough. It also restricts double stacking containers to
Parkes to Western Australia.

So far alternative energies are generally electrical in output.
Bio fuels are not very promising due to their net energy results and
the massive amount of land needed to scale them up.
It boils down to do you want to eat or drive ?

Oil is about to treble in price:

Current coal use, dependent on oil, will wind back to 19th century levels based on steam engines without oil

Forget renewable energy as every single one is fully dependent on oil from mine to manufacture to maintenance and refurbs.

Nuclear energy will be impossible: imagine mining billions of tons of rock for a few kilos of Uranium without oil, or tearing down used up reactors every 40 years or transporting and storing waste without oil.

All forms of GAS use are fully dependent on oil with compressing & transporting the stuff so oil intensive as to make it just a propagandising front-end to a very foolish OIL dependency.

So, never mind about ports and rail. If you don't solve the free-energy problem(using GEOTHERMAL), if you can't find a way to overcome your OIL addiction and all the lies that go with that, then like every junkie you will just TALK about your heroism & how great things will be whilst slowly dying in your own squalor.

And the best part for me, I don't have to prove what I say other than to defer to the laws of THERMODYNAMICS and wait while 2012 unfolds the ugliness of OIL dependency about each and every one of us