Is Faster Rail fast enough?

The Australian Government has recently embarked on a program to introduce faster passenger rail services between capital cities and regional centres. The National Faster Rail Agency, established in July 2019, was created to support economic growth and social opportunity through faster rail connections between major capital cities and growing regional centres. To this end, the Agency is charged with developing two strategies:

• A development and implementation strategy for the Australian Government’s 20-year plan for a Faster Rail Network (see illustration below)
• An investment strategy recommending faster rail project stages to link future expenditure to investment need, and increase community and industry confidence to reduce market pressures. 

Why this article?

Roads and railway lines are unique in their ability to permanently shape communities, cities, even continents, for better or for worse. Think about the Cahill Expressway’s visual impact on Sydney's CBD, or Harbour Bridge’s influence on the development of North Sydney. Given its potential long-term impact on Australia’s physical and economic development, the 20 year Faster Rail plan warrants a thorough vetting from all angles before the first spike is driven. A cursory examination of the Government’s website and recent pronouncements by the agency raise questions about the direction of the 20 year plan.

This article examines the role and initial approach being taken by National Faster Rail Agency in developing Australia’s national rail plan (see image above). Historic context is provided by considering how national rail networks have been pursued in the past in the US and Australia. This is supplemented by key points raised on this topic at the December 2019 Australasian Railway Association Conference Sydney. Key issues and concerns arising from these examples are then identified for consideration by anyone interested in passenger rail investment and its role in Australia’s urban and regional development. 

The National Faster Rail Agency

The National Faster Rail Agency is tasked with developing the National Faster Rail 20 year plan. The 20 year plan will set a critically important and overdue framework with long-term implications for the development of Australia, particularly its east coast regional centres. Whereas capital cities have natural advantages as entry points for immigration and enjoy direct access to international markets, regional centres are facing persistent challenges on multiple fronts, including:

• Climate change, as evidenced by recent unprecedented levels of bushfire frequency and destructiveness
• Extended periods of drought
• Market competition from lower cost countries brought about by improvements in communications and international logistics
• Out-migration of young workers and families to capital cities.

For example, a recent analysis of population trends in NSW by Mecone Urban Planning found that “many inland and remote regional communities are showing signs of population stagnation or decline”. Sea-change and tree-change effects, according to Mecone, are visible in coastal and local government areas close to major urban centres, characterised by higher proportions of older residents moving into those areas in comparison to capital cities. This contrasts with the on-going trend whereby younger residents are moving to larger urban areas to access employment and tertiary education opportunities, which in turn negatively impacts the future economic vitality of inland and remote regional communities.

In order to address these and related regional development challenges, Australia’s national rail strategy must have a clear vision of how rail transport technology is evolving and how it can lift the current trajectory of Australia’s regional centres.

Historical context

Two examples of the development of railway networks provide lessons on the importance of clearly articulating a problem before embarking on a solution to it, and the need for foresight in framing a vision of the future. The first example is North America’s Transcontinental Railroad, followed by a short study of the development of railway lines in Australia’s eastern states. These examples occurred during roughly the same time period in the middle to late 1800s.

The North America’s Transcontinental Railroad was first considered by the US Congress in 1845. The Pacific Railroad Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861, created a competition between two private companies to build a 3,000 km rail link between the eastern United States and California, each company beginning at opposite ends of the proposed line. The Central Pacific Railroad Company started in Sacramento, California and continued east across the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Union Pacific Railroad started westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa-Nebraska border. The two lines of track met in the middle, with each company promised 6,400 acres of land (later doubled to 12,800) and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile of track built.

The Transcontinental Railroad, completed seven years later in 1869, provided a continuous, uniform transport link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It profoundly influenced settlement patterns and economic development in the western half of North America, and opened up the American West to more rapid development. With the completion of the track, the travel time for making the 3,000-mile journey across the United States was cut from months to under a week. Connecting the two American coasts made the exchange of western resources and eastern finished products easier than ever before.

On the other side of the Pacific, the first railway line in Australia was opened between Melbourne's Flinders Street Station and Port Melbourne in Victoria in September 1854. Over the next decade, privately funded railway lines were introduced in NSW, Queensland and South Australia as the population in the colonies grew and commerce expanded. But in what seems an implausible outcome today, three different rail gauges were used, each requiring different prefabricated materials, maintenance equipment and rolling stock. Hundreds of inventions to solve these “break of gauge” problems were proposed, but none were successfully adopted. From then until today, Australia has struggled under the absurd reality of having three different, largely state-based railway gauges in operation.

For 150 years, Australian railway passengers and freight had to be shifted between trains at break of gauge platforms straddling state borders. In 1917, a person wanting to travel from Perth to Brisbane on an east-west crossing of the continent had to change trains six times. The process of standardising Australia's interstate track to a uniform gauge was only completed in 1995, although a number of regional gauge conversion projects are still underway or planned.

But something like this couldn’t happen today – or could it?

High Speed vs Faster Rail

At the 2019 Australasia Railway Association (ARA) conference in Sydney, attendees were offered two very different views on how to think about and plan for the next century of railway development in Australia.

Masafuni Shukuri, Chairman of the International High Speed Rail Association (IHRA), urged conference attendees to take a 50 year perspective. It has taken that long for Japan to complete the first 2,800 km of its current national network, with another 400km yet to be completed.

Australia should begin planning an interstate high speed rail (HSR) network now, Shukuri said, while simultaneously upgrading regional and urban passenger rail networks. Planning a national network now would reduce corridor acquisition costs, avoid incompatible development in future rail corridors, and limit the need for expensive retrofitting of stations to accommodate new train lines. This is consistent with the Australian Governments 2017 Phase 2 High Speed Rail study and Infrastructure Australia’s recommendations for implementing high speed rail in this country. Early corridor protections, according to Infrastructure Australia, would save $3.5 billion in land acquisition costs for that project.

Committing to a national network now would allow also long-haul interstate lines and stations to be better integrated into the shorter regional and urban networks. To optimise performance, reliability and safety, Chairman Shukuri recommended that Australia follow Japan’s lead and separate high speed interstate passenger trains travelling at over 300km/h from the slower regional passengers and freight trains travelling at 160 to 200km/h.

Malcolm Southwell, CEO of the Australian Government’s National Faster Rail Agency (see image below), described the agency’s 20 year plan to upgrade regional passenger services between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and their respective regional centres. This plan is based on a hub and spoke network that would cut travel times between places like Sydney and Newcastle from three hours to around one and a half hours. No national, interstate connection between capital cities are included in the agency’s brief. Planning for higher speed, interstate connections between capital cities should come later, Southwell said, given its high cost and Australia’s low population density. Perhaps anticipating comparisons with high speed rail, Southwell pointed out that Australia’s population density is around three persons per square kilometre, compared with Japan’s population density of over 350 persons per square kilometre.

Is the National Faster Rail 20 year plan on the right track?

A high level review of the National Faster Rail 20 year plan raises a number of concerns about the fundamental drivers influencing the agency’s direction.

A “national” rail plan?

While implying a national strategy in its title, the National Faster Rail 20 year plan is really no more than a disconnected collection of intrastate lines linking capital cities with their own close-in regional centres. There is nothing national about a transport network that does not extend across state boundaries and connect capital cities to eachother.

While the details then and now are vastly different, the absence of direct connections between capital cities draws immediate comparisons between the National Faster Rail 20 year plan and Australia’s 200 year experiment with multiple railway gauges. Despite advice from London’s railway experts, Australia’s early railway operators didn’t consider how the various state networks could or should be connected. As a result, high operating and capital costs were baked into each line by public and private operators adopting different rail gauges. Virtually all of the privately developed lines ended up commercial failures. The absence of a uniform approach to rail gauges has taken over 170 years and incalculable costs to untangle.

Vertebrate or invertebrate?

Another concern with the Government’s 20 year plan is the absence of central spine providing two-way connections between east coast capital cities, while also serving intermediate regional centres. This approach was taken in the 2017 Phase 2 High Speed Rail study (see illustration of HSR line below), which cost Australian taxpayers $25 million to prepare. The 20 year plan proposes rail cul-de-sacs from Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne to nearby regional centres, limiting the roles that these regional centres can play and forever constraining the economic development potential of more distant centres, such as Wagga Wagga and Taree. These and other more distant inland communities would have no rail improvements under the 20 year plan at a time when regional air services are being cut back or entirely eliminated.

A national network is not something that can simply be bolted on once intrastate networks are settled. The placement and integration of national, intrastate and urban railway stations and lines will be fundamental to the network’s end cost and in achieving its optimum performance. By committing now to a long-term strategy connecting Brisbane to Melbourne via Sydney, the Government would create an authentic national rail strategy that would distribute economic benefits right across Australia’s east coast. It would enable two-way, north-south traffic for regional centres between Brisbane and Melbourne, while still supporting east-west extensions from Brisbane and Toowoomba, Sydney and Bathurst and Melbourne and Geelong. The combination of a national railway spine connecting to urban hub and spoke systems should be an essential element of the national rail strategy.

Selection bias

Faster rail, by definition, implies trains travelling at up to 200km/h, speeds that have been achieved by commercially available passenger rail services since the late 1930’s in the US, Britain and Europe. Once key segments are built using faster rail technology, such as Sydney-Newcastle, Sydney-Canberra and Melbourne-Shepparton, it is unlikely that high speed rail would ever be developed in this country. Converting these segments to HSR at some future unspecified date would be unlikely given the sunk costs of faster rail. Australia’s experience with the Harbour Bridge, NBN and recent major road projects suggests that it is more cost effective to build major public infrastructure for the next generation, not the next election cycle.

The Faster Rail Agency’s terms of reference lock Australia into a predetermined solution based on last century’s rail technology, while our trading partners and other less developed countries look to the future. France, Germany, Spain, UK, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, China, and Morocco have HSR networks operating regularly today at over 300km/h. India and the United States are building HSR, with Viet Nam close behind. Japan, the birthplace of high speed rail in 1964, is building the next generation of high speed trains using magnetic levitation. The Chou Shinkansen, currently under construction, will operate between Tokyo and Osaka at speeds exceeding 500km/h. The faster rail plan prematurely eliminates the opportunity to introduce 21st century rail technology to Australia.

Australia’s future settlement patterns

Transport services for Australia’s future must be based on population growth and opportunities to shape urban settlement patterns over the next 50 years, not the next two decades. Urban density, not national density, should guide the nation’s rail strategy. A 50 year appraisal period is also more consistent with Australian and state government infrastructure investment guidelines.

As one of the world’s most urbanised countries, Australia’s geography and settlement patterns are both problems to be solved and solutions to overcoming the high cost of high speed rail. Currently, over 75% of Australia’s population lives in major urban centres, a figure that will only increase in the future. Over the next 50 years, capital city populations will more than double according to ABS’s higher growth assumptions; Melbourne’s population will exceed 12 million, Sydney’s population will exceed 10 million, and Brisbane’s population will exceed 5 million.

A 20 year time horizon for developing a national rail network is woefully inadequate from the standpoints of predicted population growth and the Government’s own investment logic. It will drive suboptimal solutions for connecting Australia’s main east coast centres, and exclude consideration of 21st century transport options that are more sustainable and better suited to the country’s geography and settlement patterns.

Conclusions

Faster rail is not fast enough for Australia. The 20 year plan seems designed to paper over persistent, long-term underinvestment in alternatives to road and airport projects in regional Australia, particularly at the federal level. In its place, a number of small target, state-based projects are proposed that seem well designed for media releases, photo opportunities for suits in hardhats, and election-cycle log rolling. Australia deserves better than this.

Comments and feedback are welcomed. Let’s get the conversation started.