Obviously the author doesn't like or want fast trains, or should that read real competition on the third busiest air route in the world.

And given that fact, the numbers do stack up! Furthermore, fast trains are fueled by locally available, vastly cheaper fuel regardless of movements in the oil price, which by the way sent many international airlines to the wall!

Moreover if technically literate and former merchant banker Malcolm is for it, steam and telegraph enthusiast Tony with his broken record rhetoric and devine, never wrong, wisdom, is against it.

As for value paying for the thing. The best comparison the detractors have been able to find has been in highly urbanized england.

And where the problem is so great, they've even resorted to a congestion tax just to keep cars out of London.

And given comparative resumption cost, it's no mystery why they couldn't get much out of value. It's a chalk and cheese comparison!

We for our part have large tracts of relatively cheap rural land along any proposed route, and if a wide enough corridor is resumed at fair market value and with large scale urban rezoning in play along that resumed corridor, extracted value could pay for the thing.

In any event, infrastructure that is delayed by a decade, sees the price double by the decade, which by the way serves the needs of a whole host of vested opposing interest. Who will fight on grimly hoping that it will never happen?

Think, for every dollar invested, reported studies show and before a single train rolls out, there will be 2.3 dollars of additional stimulated economic benefit or growth.

Simply put, we've always had these self confessed experts who always know all the reasons it won't work or can't be done; and in the case of fast trains, just here and nowhere else!

And had we listened to that "never ever wrong", sage advice, we'd still be living in caves chasing our food down with a stone tied to a stick!
Rhrosty.

The thing about Utopia is, people think it's a mockumentary when in reality it's a dramatisation of our government workings.

Hi Rhosty,

'Value capture' suggests that property near high-speed nodes will increase in value because of the fast-rail. But to do that, the train would have to stop at nodes near their properties. Between Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane, how many nodes, stopping-points ? After all, if property is, say, more than twenty km away from a node, its 'NtP value' is hardly going to boost its market value.

Unless, of course, there are many nodes, say, ten between Melbourne and Sydney, and between Sydney and Brisbane. At a couple of minutes' stopping at each place, plus slowing-down and starting-up time on each occasion, this might add an hour to the Melb-Syd trip, and two hours to the Melb-Bris trip, plus the costs of slowing and starting.

I'm all for localised fast-rail, say between Geelong and Melbourne, or Bathurst to Sydney, or Toowoomba/Ipswich to Brisbane - each going via, or to, the main airport. But I'm not so hot for white elephants.

You suggest that Melb-Canberra-Syd is "the third busiest air route in the world." Really ? Not New York-Washington ? or London-Manchester ? or even London-Paris ?

Just saying :)

Joe

BTW Baldrick

People just assume "very fast" doesn't rule out freight carriage. This assumption is wrong. The devil is in the detail.

Freight is far heavier than passengers per wagon. Newtonian laws of inertia (acceleration-deceleration) work against heavy freight.

Very fast trains and freight often don't mix efficiently and sink forecasts predicated on passenger only.

Freight wagons take longer to accelerate to "very fast" and much longer to slow down to a stop - meaning trains dedicated to freight need to be slower overall than passenger trains.

This reality of physics can mean:

- much of the very fast tag is nullified if freight trains are on a very fast passenger train track

- mixed passenger and freight trains are slower than speeds promised for passenger only

- having many stops for freight trains causes major slow-downs

Better overall to have energy efficient trucks (always freight carrying) as car need the road network anyway.

Once the track is laid rail networks are TOO BIG TO (BE ALLOWED TO) FAIL - whether they are efficient in speed or cost or not.

Pete

Well firstly, I'll admit I don't know much abour HSR.

But I think its a great idea and should've been taken seriously decades ago.
I think the real boondoggle is not having vision or a plan for the future, just as your opposition to such a project and the time and money spent opposing it is an extension of that boondoggle.
The more the idea is doubted, the more it ends up costing, to resume land, labour and material costs.
The boondoggle is you.

In the olden days when people had depth, grit, and determination, you'd have the clean clothes wearing naysayers who claimed it can't be done, and at the same time you'd have the people who were out there already doing it.

Think about all the things not completing this project is costing.
Increased cost to everything we already buy in transport and labour costs, non-viability of hundreds of otherwise viable projects simply because of lack of infrastructure.
And against a backdrop where we already cannot compete with other nations.

I think we should go a step further and not just go with HSR but also build a new national highway alongside it, and if it reduces shipping costs on products our nation buys and sells then we should extend this new project right up into northern Australia and build a new super-port there.

Delete the bottlenecks that make us less productive, our projects nonviable, and our nation uncompetitive.

But the numbers you're talking are a lot I'll admit.
And if implemented in any way similar to the NBN scheme then I understand why you state it can't be done.

We need to start being smart.
I'll build your railway, and I'll build it at a quarter of the price.

[cont]
To start with, I'm going to look at people in jails for non-violent offences
'You just got the opportunity to earn half off your sentence.'
Instantly saving the country a fortune for not have to pay to incarcerate them.

Then we'll take a look at the 'work for the dole' people.
I'm going to give you the chance to get some skills and contribute to the country properly.
No more whipper-snipping for the local church.

Then we'll take all the Uni students who don't complete their studies or pay off their HECS debts.
You failed your white collar studies, and have now been designated a blue collar worker.
You need to work on the national infrastucture project to pay back the debt you incurred back.
You should have studied harder and taken the debt you incurred upon the nation more seriously.

Then instead of spending $900 million on the Syrian refugees ($75,000 a head)
We'll allow them to escape the turmoil of their nation and stay here temporarily and give them food and shelter in exchange for working on the national infrastructure project.
If they really need asylum then we'll offer them a hand up - but not a hand out, and if they are genuine they will understand.
I'm sure many of them have university qualifications and could be put to use in our country.

And we'll do the same for any other immigrant that wants a free ride.

[cont]
We can support foreign workers too, we'll give food, shelter and passage to and from their countries, but we won't pay them our award wages. We'll pay them their award wages + a premium, and we'll let them keep it all to take home tax free.
The foreigners want opportunities, we'll give them opportunities.
But our nation will benefit.

Helping in this way means we no longer have to offer as much foreign aid.
Another big saving.

We'll start with buying a few containers of cheap chinese chainsaws.
You can get really good quality for $100 a piece now on ebay.
I'm sure we'll get a discount if we buy bulk.

And we'll send out all the inmates, work for the dole people, uni students who didnt take their studies seriously, refugees, immigrants and cheap foreign labour out onto 'the new frontier' with the cheap chinese chainsaws, and we're going to carve a 1km wide path right up the length of the country that will act not just for HSR but for road transport, electricity, internet and water movement if and where needed as well.
It will be the main conduit of our nation for the coming centuries.

With more people here to build this project there'll be more demand on rural farmers and they'll be able to stay afloat.
We'll build an enclosure for the HSR with a roof and solar panels that will power the trains.
The power created will help to power the settlements of workers along the track as it is being built.

We'll be cheap on fuel costs too.
We're going to commandere 'Puffing Billy' for her greatest Australian feat yet, as well as any other old working steam engines.
We'll send people and trains to go and rip up old unused track to build the new temporary track if we have to, keeping costs down.
We're going to sell the wood at top dollar at $25 bucks a bag at all Australian service stations like they already do and power the trains with the left over timber.

[cont]
We'll turn this 1km strip into a giant quarry of materials and you've achived it all on the cheap.
A tiny fraction of what others suggest.
Even saved money in some places.

We can have some of the workers in an unused factory build cheap portable housing units an a commercial scale, (which will be delivered on the trains) and these can be sold off to mining and infrastructure companies after the project is completed, as there will then be many more viable resource projects after its completed.

The reason why these projects aren't achieved is because people like you have no vision.
You're focused on ONLY thinking about how and why it can't be done, rather than thinking about what it takes to ACTUALLY GET IT DONE.
Turn it into a whole national drive that the whole country can get behind and take part in.

How much time, effort and money have you spent trying to stop this, and how much could you have achieved in 'actually doing it' and making it happen if you had the right mindset?

Already spent 20million just on the feasability.
How much could have already been achieved if you hadve had the right mindset and just went ahead and did it?
I'd have had 100 teams of 1000 workers already partially completed the initial work.
Moving the settlements on the backs of the trains as the temporary track extends.

We'll bring back billy tea and damper and camp ovens if thats what it takes and we'll make it a national experience.

Absurdly unaffordable. Taxpayers already subsidise the Overland between Adelaide and Melbourne, with fares costing twice that of flying. The
Adelaide to Darwin rail is struggling to stay afloat. Australians don't do rail. Rail is fine in countries with huge populations in small areas, where they are not as fussed about the environment. At $168 billion, Australia cannot afford such nonsense. We already exist on borrowed money, owing $440 billion and rising. And what about the voters in the rest of Australia? This absurdity arose in the fevered imagination of Bob Brown, was resurrected by Keating and Howard; now our totally inept and desperate PM has latched on to it, with the assistance of the tennis player, John Alexander. What an embarrassing shower our government is.

Hi AC,

As Pete points out, it's very unlikely that HSR will ever carry freight. I don't know the difference in ticket price in countries which have both Snail-Rail and HSR, but I suspect it is dearer for HSR by a significant factor. An inland freight-rail service from Brisbane to Melbourne, yes, but not an HSR carrying freight.

Economists, on their coffee break, have probably already done the analysis on the relationship between no. of stops & rate of decline in 'maximum possible value capture' and found, to no-one's surprise, that the more stops, the slower, and the slower, the less attractive, therefore the less demand, therefore the lower the ticket price, therefore the lower the total income AND the lower any returns from 'value capture', therefore the less viable.

So ideally, an inter-capital HSR with very few stops ? Say, only three or four between the major cities ? With the value of 'value capture' limited to the twenty km either side of each stop ?

It's not rocket science.

Cheers,

Joe

In the late 1960's I attended a guest lecture at university, where the HSR proponents recommended a train from Canberra through Goulbourn to Sydney and on to Newcastle. No airport stops. Only 5 or 6 stations, total.

BHP was a partner... remember then? When that was "The Big Australian" with Australian board and Australian employees... but I digress.

Half of the presentation focussed on the need for very strong legislation, both State and Federal:
Compulsory land acquisition rights.
All land, prior to rezoning, would be first acquired by the Consortium, to which the profits from rezoning would go.
The Consortium would have wide powers to rezone land to rail, housing, industrial and commercial uses. Forget local government and the Land & Environment Court - these fellows would be kings.

Nothing has changed in the past 60 years.

The Australian project simply cannot stand on its own two feet. I expect that the majority of existing HSR lines globally operate profitably, either.

HSR as presented in Australia is essentially a land grab, a developer's dream and a con job. Be very afraid when private capital is mentioned in the same breath as HSR.

Besides which, who needs another whopping great corridor dividing our major communities and slicing through the countryside?

Yes Joe and to correct any misunderstanding; I meant the third busiest in terms of domestic travel, which by the way, was all that kept Qantas afloat during the time when other airlines were dying on the vine for lack of clientele or as a consequence of the GFC or the highest oil prices in living memory.

As for freight we need a very different system that would probably be limited to around 160 klm's PH and serve all our needs for future intercity overnight freight.

The key there being the elimination of all stops(overpasses, underpasses) or slowing curves, some of which can be ameliorated just by engineered cambers, which would allow much of the existing system to have a second life as a freight specific line.

Two kilometre long double decker container cargo trains, would make such a freight specific service viable. And given the elimination of all unnecessary stops or bottle necks, allow the effect of inertia and gravity to work for us!

In Japan which holds the current speed record (around 600 klm's PH for very fast trains, stops can be just 20 klicks apart? Blink and you'll miss it? But not the acceleration or deceleration.

We for our part and in the interest of captured value could spread them out further and just concentrate on good service connections (light rail or monorail) that might even utilize the separation green space between our dual lane commuter highways.

What might kill the idea is electric planes! And that is not as silly as it sounds, given electric rail gun catapults, new batteries, spray on solar panels, (the paint job) brushless high speed, extremely efficient, 10,000+ RPM motors and or, helium lifted airships?

Moreover it is just a matter of time before we see autonomous flying cars (with folding wings) transporting many of us. And high speed NBN, making much of it entirely unnecessary?
Rhrosty.

If the merits of HSR can truly be qualified then here is how it could be funded, but it would take a paradigm shift in fiscal policy for this to occur.

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-12/mary-mellor-s-debt-or-democracy-why-not-quantitative-easing-for-people

Cheers Geoff

Hi Rhrosty

So can we combine your vision of nuclear power and trains mate?

Maybe small nuclear reactors in the train engines up front?

Using Uranium or your Thorium idea?

Or an electric track or overhead wires fed by small town reactors every 30 kms?

Please inspect this Barents Observer, 2011, article: http://barentsobserver.com/en/sections/society/russia-designs-nuclear-train which reports:

"Russia Designs Nuclear Train"

"...The engine of the train will be a small fast breeder reactor,

The design is made by Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation, Rosatom.

...The estimated cost of construction is still unclear, and nothing is yet said about the safety of such train.

This is not the first time the idea of a nuclear powered train is presented. Back in 1956,...The Ministry said such locomotives could be used in the High North and remote areas of Siberia,

Another feature with the proposed nuclear powered train is that it can easily be converted to a mobile nuclear power plant, supplying energy to remote areas and industrial sites."

Sounds feasible. Also Canberra's unpopular Light Rail (Tram) Project would be a goer if it was nuclear.

Pete
April 1. 2016

Rhosty,

"We for our part have large tracts of relatively cheap rural land along any proposed route, and if a wide enough corridor is resumed at fair market value and with large scale urban rezoning in play along that resumed corridor, extracted value could pay for the thing."

What's the point of the wide corridor etc., if the trains don't stop?
Or do you envisage lots of urban stops for the high speed trains?

No I don't envisage lots of stops just four or five?

And these places would be out in what is now whoop whoop.

And as the construction moved on rezoned and allowed to become whole new towns, replete with their own industrial estates and CBD's!

This would probably mean stops could be limited to around 200 klm's apart.

And become the nucleus of a passenger transport hubs, serviced by planned light rail and monorail.

If you drive, it's stressful, whereas train travel can be turned into productive time, with the use of onboard Wi-fi, laptops, tablets, mobile phone and assisted video conferencing etc. Allowing all manner of business activities and or study to be undertaken or completed.

And given the indians are successful building a (cheaper than coal) 300 megawatt thorium reactor, I dare say and given our reserves, we could build as many as it would take to power the whole system and the new towns/cities. And for less than half the cost of current gold plated power delivery! And huge incentive to populate the new cities and de-stress the old ones!

We'd see massive movement from our overcrowded cities, and with it, a return to affordable housing.

And let's not forget the economic stimulus such a big project would mean.

Currently we are trying to stack and pack our large and already massively overcrowded capital cities, with tinned people.

Sure we can make them taller all while those developers against decentralization and anything that might assist it and housing affordability, rub their hands together all the way to the bank!?

Ditto airline executives and shareholders posting here with all the outlandish negatives the human imagination can construct!
Rhrosty.

I remember a movie cartoon from decades ago, of a rabbit or bird or maybe Roadrunner in a prison cell; he opens the door and sees no guards around, so he goes back in and gets a saw to cut a door in the wall, and escapes.

Rhosty, there are actually large towns and cities out there, say Albury, Wagga, Bathurst (or Goulburn), Dubbo, Armidale, Toowoomba, which would be the freight nodes on an internal rail system. High-paying passengers ? Maybe not so much.

But what the hell, if we're in debt, what's a few tens of billions more ? It would be so cool to have a very high-speed train whizzing across the plains, maybe up and over Mt Panorama. Our kids could pay for it.

Joe

It is too late to read all this now, but here is my contribution to the HST debate.
First I do not think we will have the money to do the job. We have a
much more important project ahead of us. The construction of a base
load system that can supply electricity for many overcast days.

What we can afford is the "Fast Enough Train" project.
When the present railways were built the earth moving machinery was
horses and scoops. When you travel to Melbourne by train between
Sydney and Wagga you spend a lot of the journey watching the other end of the train.
The tight curves restrict the speed of the train to very low speeds.
Additionally the seat of your pants tell you about the construction standard of the permway.

What is needed is to relay the track to go through the hills instead
of going around every little hill. Then the track should be relaid
to UK main line standards. The difference in the smoothness of the
travel enable still further increase in speed.

Those of you who have travelled on the UK's mainlines will know what
I am on about. Speeds around 200km/hr + are common.
As far as the rolling stock is concerned we already have them.
The XPT are in fact the UK's 125s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWVuRwtjGek

The first train in the link is in fact the XPT alias 125.

I've gone off on a tangent daydreaming about this for the last few days, and I have to reluctantly agree with the others that we cant afford it.
And we certainly cant afford to expand the project like I would like to do, not if we employ existing ideas and means to build it.

But this doesn't mean that I think we shouldn't do it.
This in fact is more reasons why I think we should and bring the nation together.

Why is it that only world wars garner a team effort and commraderie within a nation?
I want that determination without blood being spilled.
In some ways we really are at war already.

I think we should embark on the greatest infrastructure project the country has ever known and build a 6-lane national highway with 4 high speed rail lines connecting all our nations capital cities from Darwin, Townsville, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and across to Perth.

We also connect power, internet, water oil and gas lines and we move water between dams when we need to.

The fact we can't afford it is steering up away from the inevitable truth.
Our nation is slowly dying and soon all we will be are tenants in this country when it has been completely bought by foreigners.
China's population will continue to increase until it stabilises around 2050 and India's population will grow right through until the end of the century.

We need to take this problem seriously, we can't afford not to.

So we have to figure out HOW we can bend the rules and pull out all stops as a nation to make it happen.

I like the idea of closing the road down once a year for a F1 / V8 / Prestige cars Cannonball Run.
Racing across the Nullabor to the finishing line.
I think this could be one way we could get money back, we need to look at every single way possible.
We NEED to do it, failure to do so should really not be considered an option.

Of course, when we talk so easily about 'a high-seed train', we mean many, many trains on each route, every hour or so, otherwise everybody would have to pile on the once-every-four-or-six-hours-train. Each way.

Indulging the inner megalomaniac, I suggest at first relatively short runs for high-speed trains, say from Katoomba-Parramatta, Hornsby-Wahroonga, Camden/Campbelltown-Parramatta; Toowoomba-Wacol, Sippie Downs-Kedron; Adelaide- ...., well not just yet; Ballarat-Sunshine, Kilmore-Tullamarine, Nar Nar Goon-Dandenong; Mandurah-Canning Vale.

On the other hand, if money was no object, we could build a high-speed freight network right around the interior of Australia: Charters Towers-Mt Isa-Katherine-Broome-Hedland-Northam-Port Augusta-Swan Hill-Dubbo-Roma-Charters Towers. Piece of cake !

All solar-powered of course.

Ah the fantasy of power ! That felt good !

Joe.