High-Speed Rail, Australia ready to try it again

After a number of false starts, Australia is ready to try it again: build a high-speed railway. It has set up an authority to look into the idea, and invited experts to propose the best way to build what has become one of the most elusive projects in the country. Although it is overseeing the construction of nearly every other type of public infrastructure – from roads to metro lines to airports – it has yet to embark on the kind of project that would be transformational for transportation in a country known for its vast distances.

The federal government has committed AU$500 million to planning a network, and assigned nearly AU$80 million to the development of a business case for the first line, which would run between Sydney and Newcastle, a smaller city located less than 200 kilometres up the east coast. The authority, known as the High Speed Rail Authority, has until the end of 2024 to present the case.

«After a history of failed proposals dating back to 1984, the new plans provide some cause for optimism that Australia could have some high-speed rail by 2037,» reads a recent opinion piece in The Conversation, an online academic publication, by Philip Laird, an Honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Wollongong.

The authority’s inaugural chief executive, engineer Tim Parker, was appointed earlier this year after successfully leading project development at Sydney Metro.

Mr Parker told The Newcastle Herald that the business case would also compare the cost of high-speed rail with the cost of widening the M1 Pacific Motorway to take more cars and upgrading the existing heavy rail line, on which it takes almost three hours to complete the Newcastle-Sydney journey. High speed rail would do the same trip in about one hour.

«We think, with the feedback we’re getting from industry, 2027-28 is a great time to be building a big project again, simply because a lot of the other ones are finishing,» Mr Parker told the newspaper.

In announcing in August the drilling of boreholes in areas between the two cities to study the geological conditions along the likely route, Catherine King, the federal minister for infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, said the line would be a boon for the economy. «High-speed rail means generations of new opportunities for regional Australia, creating more jobs in more locations and giving people greater choices in where they live, work, study and play,» she said.

If the line between Sydney and Newcastle does get built and goes on to provide a successful service, the authority would look at building the case to extend the network to other eastern cities, including Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne. The immediate benefit that the service would bring to commuters would be to reduce congestion along the motorway between the two cities, as well as the existing railway, the busiest in the country with nearly 15 million passengers a year. «Economic growth is hampered by a slow rail alignment and shared passenger and freight services significantly constraining current operations, let alone additional services,» according to the authority.

Population growth will add a further strain to the existing infrastructure. By the early 2040s, the number of people living along the corridor is expected to grow by 22 percent to nearly 1.2 million. «High-speed rail is a game-changer for our region – increasing capacity, cutting carbon, delivering better connectivity and creating good local jobs and opportunities,» Sharon Claydon, Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives and the federal member for Newcastle, says in the same statement as King.

Then there is the effect it would have on air travel by convincing travellers of the convenience of going to the train station rather than the airport. In an opinion piece published in early September in The Newcastle Herald newspaper, Phillip O’Neill, a professor of economic geography at Western Sydney University, said high-speed rail greatly reduced CO2 emissions by discouraging air travel. He gave the example of the route between Sydney and Melbourne, the busiest in the country. In 2023-24, an estimated 7.92 million passengers flying between these two cities are to produce about 1.5 million tonnes of emissions. «Including travel to and from airports and other flight routes along the corridor…this adds up to about 2% of annual domestic transport emissions,» he says. King says a project of this kind had the promise of changing the lives of millions. «No project captures the imagination of Australians quite like high-speed rail.»