Australia's fast train sidetracked for cheaper option

By GREG ANSLEY in CANBERRA

Australia's rail renaissance will continue without the Very Fast Trains (VFT) planned to link the eastern seaboard's major cities.

The VFT proposal, after a decade of plans and false starts, has been axed by the Government after estimates that start-up costs for a service linking Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne would require a taxpayer subsidy of A$50 billion ($60 billion).

An earlier plan to link Canberra and Sydney with a VFT was scrapped because of a much smaller subsidy requirement of up to A$2 billion.

The decision to maintain Australia's rail system with conventional technology follows the A$1.2 billion sale of the state-owned National Rail Corporation to the partnership of Toll Holdings and Lang Corp.

Lang, now renamed Patrick Corporation, this month also bought a half share of Sir Richard Branson's Australian airline, Virgin Blue.

National Rail, sold together with FreightCorp by the Federal, New South Wales and Victorian governments, operates through the two biggest eastern states and across the continent to Perth.

With the privatisation of rail systems in all other states, Queensland's network now remains the only government-owned railway.

National Rail, which since reforms earlier launched by the Federal Government has increased its share of freight carried between the east and west coasts, will increase rail's emphasis on winning an increasing share of freight business from road operators.

The Australian Rail Track Corporation, which maintains much of the eastern network's railway lines, intends spending A$507 million over the next five years upgrading lines, A$398 million of this on the major links between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

According to Deutsche Bank analysts, if heavy regulation was eased and management overhauled, the combined modernisation could increase rail's share of interstate freight by almost 3 million tonnes a year within five years.

This would represent a 50 per cent increase in business, most of it shifted from road.

Work has also finally started on the A$1.3 billion Alice Springs to Darwin railway - with Government subsidies of A$560 million - and the first link of a planned inland rail corridor has been launched between Melbourne and Goondiwindi.

The proposed corridor will link the ports of Newcastle in NSW, Gladstone and Townsville in north Queensland and Wyndham in northern Western Australia, in a line passing through Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin.

These proposals, with the final axing of any hope of a VFT system, confirm that passengers will take a back seat to freight in the transport battle now shaping between rail and road.

Plans for a VFT were originally mooted in the early 1990s, but failed to gain support until the Federal Government appointed a project group in 1997 and a year later selected the Speedrail consortium to push ahead with a planned Canberra-Sydney link.

Speedrail's French TGV train was selected ahead of the revolutionary German Maglev system - levitating trains by magnetic force above a monorail - and two tilt-train proposals based on high-speed upgrading of existing links.

That plan was dumped because of the need for large subsidies, but the Government last year ordered a A$20 million study of a possible high-speed system running between Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

That proposal has also been canned because of the size of the subsidies required.