Will we ever get a fast train between Sydney and Melbourne?
Rob Mills wants to know if we’re ever going to get a fast train between Sydney and Melbourne. Well, here’s the answer.
The other day on Instagram I stumbled upon a story from Rob ‘Millsy’ Mills.
The entertainer, frustrated by yet another delayed flight, posted, “Every time I’m on the plane from Melbourne to Sydney … I cannot understand why we don’t have a fast train.”
The Australian Idol alum is not alone. Thousands of Aussies have asked the same question over the last few decades.
So I made it my mission to find out whether Millsy’s fast train fantasy could finally leave the station.
What’s on the table
Anthony Albanese has been talking about fast trains for years.
In the 2022 election campaign, he said, “If I’m elected prime minister, I want ours to be the first government that actually gets work underway on high-speed rail.”
Spoiler: he was elected prime minister, and not long after taking office he established the High Speed Rail Authority to plan, design and eventually build the network.
The grand plan is to build a high speed rail network along the east coast with stops in Brisbane, Newcastle, Central Coast, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
The HSRA wants to start by building the line between Newcastle and Sydney, arguably the most challenging part of the entire project due to the fact they’d have to tunnel under the Hawkesbury River.
That initial stretch alone could cost up to $30 billion and take more than 10 years to complete, if the project actually gets the green light from the federal government.
If all goes to plan — and that’s a very big “if” — the full 1800km network would then be finished by 2060, at an estimated cost of approximately $200 billion.
What travel times could we expect
In theory, trains on the high speed rail network would be able to travel at more than 300 km/ph.
The expected journey times would be:
Sydney to Melbourne: four hours
Brisbane to Sydney: four hours
Canberra to Sydney: 90 minutes
Newcastle to Sydney: one hour
There’d be roughly 520 seats on board across standard class and business class, and passengers would have access to high speed internet and food and beverage facilities.
In the yes camp
As part of my mission to get an answer for Millsy, I sat down with Professor Christopher Pettit from UNSW where he is Director of the City Futures Research Centre (you can watch the interview in the video player at the top of this article).
He said a high speed rail network is “absolutely a viable option”, even declaring it should be “the project of choice for our country”.
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics are forecasting Australia’s population to grow by nine million people by 2050,” he told news.com.au.
“Where are all those people going to go? Do we really want all of those people to be moving to the capital cities?”
Professor Pettit said a high speed rail network would help accommodate future growth, “so we can have a lot of people coming into the country and not put a lot of pressure on our infrastructure in our capital cities”.
A high-speed train would also be far more environmentally friendly than plane travel, the professor said, with CO2 emissions expected to be 10 times less.
What about the staggering cost?
Professor Pettit said the government could use “value capture” to reclaim some of the increase in land and property values that would result once the project is completed.
For example, the government could buy up land along the railway line and sell it later when it’s worth more, or could charge developers an infrastructure contribution fee when they build near the new line because their project would be more profitable.
“We’ve done a study at the City Futures Research Center at UNSW through the Value Australia project … under various scenarios, if we were to have an 1-1.25 million people live up and down that corridor, you could realise $140 billion of additional value that could be captured through such a policy that could then go towards funding a huge chunk of this high speed rail infrastructure,” he said.
In the no camp
In 2020, the Grattan Institute released a report that declared high speed rail is simply “not realistic” for Australia.
Firstly, they argued that Australia’s small and dispersed population is not suited to bullet trains.
“Around the world, it is very rare for bullet trains to span a distance of 1000km or more. When they do, they usually serve populations of at least 50 million,” the report said.
The Grattan Institute also rejected the claim that high speed rail would be dramatically more environmentally friendly than plane travel.
“Yes, once they’re up and running they emit far less than today’s planes,” the report said. “But the train line would take almost 50 years to build, and the construction process is enormously emissions intensive.
“Building a bullet train would hinder rather than help Australia’s efforts to reach net zero emissions by 2050.”
The 2020 report also found that “most bullet trains overseas required significant public subsidies to build, and often still require significant subsidies to operate.”
It added, “The true global story is that good bullet trains are expensive and bad bullet trains are very expensive”.
So, will it ever happen?
During my sit down with Professor Pettit, I asked him to look inside his crystal ball and tell me the likelihood of the high speed rail network becoming a reality.
“I would say it’s a 70 per cent chance that it’s going to be built,” he said.
Professor Pettit acknowledged the ambitious project is a “political hot potato” and said even though the current government is supportive of the idea, it could be canned by future governments.
But he added that if the proposed Newcastle to Sydney leg gets the green light and proves to be successful, it could convince the powers that be to complete the entire line from Brisbane to Melbourne.
“If we can get that leg built, I think the rest will come,” he said.
As for whether it could actually be up and running by 2060, Professor Pettit remains cautiously optimistic.
“In China, they started building high speed rail in the 1990s, and here we are probably 30 years later, they’ve built over 40,000km,” he said. “And they’re building another 20,000km in the next five years.
“If China can build 20,000km in five years, surely we can build 1800km over 30 years.”
So Millsy, while you might be stuck on the tarmac for now, there is a chance that in 35 years time you’ll be posting from a fast train instead.
Originally published as Will we ever get a fast train between Sydney and Melbourne?
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