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Federal budget 2017: Parkes perfectly placed to ride rail boom

In 1917, Kenneth Keith saw the greatest Australian rail project of the 20th century come to ­fruition.

Mayor Ken Keith, at Parkes train station, predicts the Inland Rail project will transform the NSW town. Picture: Rebecca Bennett.
Mayor Ken Keith, at Parkes train station, predicts the Inland Rail project will transform the NSW town. Picture: Rebecca Bennett.

In 1917, nine years after he’d settled on a grazing and cropping property just outside Parkes in NSW’s central west, Kenneth Keith saw the greatest Australian rail project of the 20th century come to ­fruition.

On October 17 that year, the dream of the fathers of Federation, a transcontinental railway, became a reality. Soon after, passengers and freight from Perth rolled through to the eastern states on the line running through his land.

Now, a century on, Kenneth Keith’s grandson and namesake is “on cloud nine”, with confirmation in the federal budget that the great Australian rail project of the 21st century, the $8.4 billion inland rail project from Melbourne to Brisbane, is going to happen.

Not only will construction start later this year, but a new “roundabout” section linking the transcontinental and inland rail lines will run through his grandfather’s property, passed down to him and which he still farms.

Ken Keith, the Mayor of Parkes and chairman of the Melbourne Brisbane Inland Rail Alliance, predicts a rich future for the town as a ­regional powerhouse making, storing and moving agricultural and manufactured products, leveraging on the unique advantage that will come from being at the ­intersection of the two great rail lines.

In expectation of the opportunity, under Mr Keith’s watch Parkes has secured a 600ha site for a “24/7 logistics hub” where some activity has already begun, and completed a multi-million-dollar upgrade of its airport.

“I am passionate and very ­excited about this,” Mr Keith said.

Many towns along the 1700km inland rail line should benefit during the construction phase over the next seven years and then from the ongoing economic development that will stem from its completion. These include Narromine, Narrabri and Moree in NSW, and Toowoomba and ­Calvert in Queensland.

But because of its location on the intersection of the great east-west and north-south rail routes, its relative proximity to Sydney, and the fact it already has a varied local economy with farming, light manufacturing and mining, Parkes, with a shire population of 15,000, is widely regarded as likely to win the biggest share of the ­lottery.

“Parkes will really be the heart, to some extent, of the freight routes,” Infrastructure and Transport Minister Darren Chester said this week.

Among the potential for new developments, Mr Keith said, was a massive freight distribution and warehousing centre which could store anything from fuel to fertiliser, and “distribute it to 80 per cent of Australia’s population overnight with just-in-time ­delivery”.

“The second thing is that it will create a better terms of trade for the farming industry along that route,” Mr Keith said, suggesting that the freight component cost of getting grain to markets and ports could be halved.

The third element was the prospect superior transport had to encourage value adding of agricultural products and start-up manufacturing, with industrial land prices a tenth of what they were in western Sydney.

“We could crush canola and make it into oil ready for the supermarket shelves in Asia,” Mr Keith said.

Fresh produce could be shipped up the line to Toowoo­mba and flown to Asia via the Wellcamp airport. The project is designed for freight trains but leaves open the possibility of passenger services at the discretion of state rail authorities.

Continent-spanning, federally funded rail projects don’t happen that often in Australia and Mr Chester had no hesitation in promoting a historic parallel.

“There’s a little bit of symbolism, I guess, that we have finally made the big decision to put $8.4bn into this Melbourne-­Brisbane route 100 years after the transcontinental was finished,” he said.

The link completing the transcontinental railway, known as the Trans-Australian railway, was built across the Nullarbor Plain from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta in five years from 1912, at a cost of £4 million, and covered almost exactly the same distance the ­inland rail project will.

The promise of a railway was an element in persuading a lukewarm West Australian government to agree to federation.

When the two work teams who had separately started construction from Kalgoorlie and Port ­Augusta met in 1917, Sir John Forrest, former premier of WA and at that stage a federal parliamentarian, said: “Western Australia, comprising one-third of the continent, hitherto isolated and practically unknown, is from today, in reality, a part of the Australian Federation.’’

The president of the National Farmers Federation, Fiona Simson, spoke of equal ambition for the inland rail project. “This is a piece of nation-building infrastructure,” she said. “Once we ­actually have the commitment from government to build it, it will open the way for private investment to extend it even further.”

Read related topics:Federal Budget

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/budget-2017/infrastructure/federal-budget-2017-parkes-perfectly-placed-to-ride-rail-boom/news-story/d85179175da3e24e54563f97e6292979