Surely Sydney-Canberra would be better for a prestige generation-defining nation-building project than what any other country would call a regional line. It’d actually make sense as a federal project, in a way that a purely intrastate line in NSW would not, it would all but kill a busy aviation corridor that only exists because the existing link is pathetically slow, and (especially if you terminate it at a new station in/under central Canberra with a through connection) would form the start of a link to Melbourne, joining Australia’s two most populous cities via the capital.
That’s if you think of these things as once-in-a-generation Snowy Mountains-style prestige projects that the country can only do one of at once. If we’re building high-speed rail as a utility rather than just to be able to say that we’ve joined the HSR big boys’ club just like Algeria and Indonesia, we should parallelise. Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines (once they’re relatively cheaply electrified, at least) until faster lines replace them, electrify lines and pick the low-hanging fruit of the particularly slow, winding sections. Build a showcase HSR line to Canberra whilst quietly upgrading the rest of the network. Get Melbourne-Sydney down to 8 hours and increase train frequency from 2 a day to 4, while upgrading the trains with modern amenities like fast WiFi and power sockets do that the time isn’t dead time. Then, once Canberra HSR is up and connecting Sydney and Canberra within an hour, punch through and connect to the legacy Melbourne line, bringing the time down further, and then gradually replace legacy segments with high-speed bypasses.
Quiet small upgrades are good. You do a couple of them and your rail network becomes a lot more usable.
Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines
I don’t think this is as useful or easy to do as it might seem, because track gauge/electrification standards are all over the place and sharing tracks with normal trains makes your HSR unreliable and constrained in terms of scheduling. Even normal rail lines barely share track because you don’t want issues from one line cascading onto another
The sharing is better than nothing. For the first/last mile of accessing central stations, that is the norm in countries like Germany, and a Sydney-Melbourne Shinkansen turning into a XPT somewhere around Wagga Wagga where it rejoins the legacy line is also doable, and better than the status quo. And gauge seems to be a settled issue everywhere except for Queensland north of Brisbane and the Victorian suburban/regional networks, whose interstate-reaching routes have all been regauged.
Trickier details would be electrification (you’d want 25kV AC to deliver enough power to accelerate fast, but in Melbourne/Sydney, you may need to either make do with lower legacy voltages, necessitating multi-system capabilities as in Europe, or have a dedicated road).
Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines
Queensland doesn’t run standard gauge, so that’s extra hard up here.
It’s so frustrating to me that even relatively new projects like Cross-River Rail didn’t build dual-gauge so they could be compatible with a future high speed project.
Neither did Japan until the Shinkansen. (In fact, aren’t both Cape-gauge?)
Any interstate HSR link to Brisbane would be standard gauge, as the XPT is. An intrastate link going north towards Cairns/Townsville may be classic-compatible Cape gauge if done incrementally, though given that one would typically break one’s journey in Brisbane, this is not catastrophic. Unless suddenly funds become available to build a new Shinkansen-style network from scratch, in which case standard-gauge would be the way to go.
Surely Sydney-Canberra would be better for a prestige generation-defining nation-building project than what any other country would call a regional line. It’d actually make sense as a federal project, in a way that a purely intrastate line in NSW would not, it would all but kill a busy aviation corridor that only exists because the existing link is pathetically slow, and (especially if you terminate it at a new station in/under central Canberra with a through connection) would form the start of a link to Melbourne, joining Australia’s two most populous cities via the capital.
That’s if you think of these things as once-in-a-generation Snowy Mountains-style prestige projects that the country can only do one of at once. If we’re building high-speed rail as a utility rather than just to be able to say that we’ve joined the HSR big boys’ club just like Algeria and Indonesia, we should parallelise. Establish national standards for high-speed rail, in a way that is classic-compatible, so that trains can run slowly on legacy lines (once they’re relatively cheaply electrified, at least) until faster lines replace them, electrify lines and pick the low-hanging fruit of the particularly slow, winding sections. Build a showcase HSR line to Canberra whilst quietly upgrading the rest of the network. Get Melbourne-Sydney down to 8 hours and increase train frequency from 2 a day to 4, while upgrading the trains with modern amenities like fast WiFi and power sockets do that the time isn’t dead time. Then, once Canberra HSR is up and connecting Sydney and Canberra within an hour, punch through and connect to the legacy Melbourne line, bringing the time down further, and then gradually replace legacy segments with high-speed bypasses.
Quiet small upgrades are good. You do a couple of them and your rail network becomes a lot more usable.
I don’t think this is as useful or easy to do as it might seem, because track gauge/electrification standards are all over the place and sharing tracks with normal trains makes your HSR unreliable and constrained in terms of scheduling. Even normal rail lines barely share track because you don’t want issues from one line cascading onto another
The sharing is better than nothing. For the first/last mile of accessing central stations, that is the norm in countries like Germany, and a Sydney-Melbourne Shinkansen turning into a XPT somewhere around Wagga Wagga where it rejoins the legacy line is also doable, and better than the status quo. And gauge seems to be a settled issue everywhere except for Queensland north of Brisbane and the Victorian suburban/regional networks, whose interstate-reaching routes have all been regauged.
Trickier details would be electrification (you’d want 25kV AC to deliver enough power to accelerate fast, but in Melbourne/Sydney, you may need to either make do with lower legacy voltages, necessitating multi-system capabilities as in Europe, or have a dedicated road).
Give this person the job. Well thought out response.
Queensland doesn’t run standard gauge, so that’s extra hard up here.
It’s so frustrating to me that even relatively new projects like Cross-River Rail didn’t build dual-gauge so they could be compatible with a future high speed project.
Neither did Japan until the Shinkansen. (In fact, aren’t both Cape-gauge?)
Any interstate HSR link to Brisbane would be standard gauge, as the XPT is. An intrastate link going north towards Cairns/Townsville may be classic-compatible Cape gauge if done incrementally, though given that one would typically break one’s journey in Brisbane, this is not catastrophic. Unless suddenly funds become available to build a new Shinkansen-style network from scratch, in which case standard-gauge would be the way to go.