On October 28, 1983, Dr Paul Wild boarded a train in Canberra bound for Sydney where he was due for an afternoon meeting. The bespectacled astronomer and then CSIRO chairman was a rail enthusiast who grew up in England enraptured by its Great Western Railway (GWR) and idolising the brilliant engineer who designed it in the 1830s, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
It had been three decades since Wild’s last country train journey in Australia and, as he later recalled, he had “high hopes for how things had improved” on NSW’s new and much publicised Express Passenger Train (XPT).
But he was disappointed. With a leisurely pace and long stops at stations, the journey’s overall time to Sydney was four hours and 37 minutes – 20 minutes more than scheduled. Wild later calculated the average speed was 70.6km/h.
“After I flew home that night, I looked up an old reference book,” he later explained. “Had the XPT completed the run in an even four hours… it would have travelled at the same average speed, 81.6km/h, as the GWR’s London to Bristol Express in 1851.”
And so an idea was born, one which has burned brightly in the minds of generations of engineers, politicians and travel-weary Australians ever since: a high-speed rail network connecting Australia’s east coast.
Today, there are more than 64,000 kilometres of high-speed rail lines in 22 countries, with another 16,000 kilometres under construction. China alone, in the decade to 2022, built 40,493 kilometres of high-speed rail – enough to whiz between Brisbane and Melbourne 23 times – at speeds up to 350km/h.
Not a metre of track has been laid in Australia. The train from Sydney to Canberra still takes four hours 7 minutes and Sydney to Melbourne is a bottom-numbing 11 hours.
Yet the dream lives on.
After decades of false starts, Australia is now arguably the closest it has ever been to embarking on a high-speed rail project. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected within days to release a business case for the first leg of an east-coast network. “I think that it absolutely makes sense,” he said last week.
But will the $90 billion cost of a Sydney to Newcastle high-speed line prove insurmountable? And can high-speed rail ever work in a country as vast and sparsely populated as Australia?
First, just how high is very high speed?
The site of a bullet train zooming past Mount Fuji is one of the most iconic images of modern Japan. Engineers first devised a dangan ressha (“bullet train”) in the 1930s, inspired by steam-powered locomotives breaking speed records of above 200km/h in Europe. By the 1950s, demand for train travel between Tokyo and Osaka, which took 6½ hours, was overwhelming. The Japan National Railways proposed that with straight, dedicated tracks and more powerful trains, it could halve the commute.
The Tokaido Shinkansen (shinkansen means “new trunk line”) launched on October 1, 1964, just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, slashing the trip to four hours then, a year later, to three hours and 10 minutes. (Today it takes 2½ hours, at 285km/h.) Inspired, France opened the world’s second high-speed rail service, the Paris to Lyon TGV (train à grande vitesse, or train of very high speed) in 1981, with speeds of 260km/h. Most recently, nations with new lines have included Indonesia (Jakarta to Bandung at 300km/hr), Serbia (Belgrade to Novi Sad at 200km/h) and Morocco (Tangier to Kenitra at 320km/h). India is building its first high-speed line (Mumbai to Ahmedabad at 320km/h), which will use Japanese trains.
China has two-thirds of the world’s high-speed railways, with a rapid expansion serving as a symbol of its economic rise (as well as of the relative ease that authoritarian governments have in rolling out large infrastructure projects). Not all projects around the world go smoothly. Britain’s High Speed 2 (HS2) project from London to Birmingham, for example, has been bogged down in delays, cost blowouts and planning failures. In the US, a San Francisco to Los Angeles line due to open in 2020 has more than tripled in cost to $US120 billion ($170 billion) and the first section won’t run until 2032; the Trump government last year cut a planning grant for a high-speed link between Dallas and Houston, saying if the project goes ahead it will have to do so without taxpayer funds.
In any case, the International Union of Railways defines high-speed rail as a train system that travels at 250km/h or faster on new tracks, or existing tracks upgraded to accommodate trains of 200km/h or faster.
Fast trains all use aerodynamic designs to reduce wind resistance. Motors are distributed under axles along the train rather than a front locomotive dragging the train forward. Modern sleepers, on which tracks rest, are made of pre-stressed concrete for optimal stability while track segments are welded into one continuous rail line (rather than segments of 25 to 50 metres) with long easy curves where necessary.
Getting this wrong can be disastrous. In 2013, 79 people were killed and 143 injured when a high-speed train derailed outside Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain after it rounded a bend at 190km/h – double the 80km/h limit for that section of track. In that case, the Spanish train was using a hybrid train line with only some sections built for fast trains and others configured for regular trains. (Another high-speed rail disaster in Spain in January saw a train derail near Adamuz, in the south of the country, killing 46 people. An investigation is still underway.)
Despite these high-profile crashes, high-speed rail generally has a good reputation for safety. Japan’s Shinkansen has carried more than 10 billion passengers since it first opened without recording a passenger fatality.
It takes between 10 and 20 kilometres for a train to build up to a speed of 300km/h, at which point a kilometre will pass you by in just 12 seconds. In a minute, you will have travelled five kilometres. China’s high-speed rail network is the fastest, at up to 350km/h, while most of those in Japan and Europe operate between 250km/h and 300km/h.
Meanwhile, “maglev” – or magnetic levitation – trains use electromagnetic force to hover several centimetres above tracks. The first and only high-speed maglev running is the Shanghai Transrapid, which whisks passengers the 30 kilometres to Pudong International Airport in eight minutes and 10 seconds. Japan plans its own maglev between Tokyo and Nagoya that will make its Shinkansen trains look as if they are dawdling, but it will not open until 2035 at the earliest. Australia’s long-distance passenger trains have a top speed of 160km/h; the proposed new high-speed rail would double that.
Why does high-speed rail feel like deja vu in Australia?
A perfect storm of ineptitude and arrogance among Australia’s colonial administrators in the 1840s led to NSW, Victoria and Queensland each building railway networks with tracks of different widths, making it impossible to link them up. “We’ve been paying for it ever since,” says Phillip Laird, an honorary fellow at the University of Wollongong who has studied the potential for faster and high-speed rail in Australia for decades. Trains with fixed axle widths could not travel across state lines, hampering the use of rail to move people and goods around the country, says Laird, meaning more cars and trucks on our roads. A standard gauge line was finally built to Melbourne from Sydney in 1962, making it possible to travel between the two capitals in the same train for the first time.
It was in this sorry state of affairs that Paul Wild, the CSIRO boss, was inspired to develop his Fast Railway proposal in the mid-80s. The Commonwealth baulked at the cost and refused to fund a study into the idea – a response Wild thought was typical of a country trapped in the “stagnation of 19th-century thought”.
A couple of years later, transport group TNT, Japanese construction giant Kumagai Gumi, Elders IXL and mining giant BHP revived the proposal, and rebadged it the Very Fast Train. But the partnership fell apart due to competing interests and a refusal by the Hawke government give it favourable tax concessions. The project folded in 1991.
The dream didn’t stay dead for long. But a detailed proposal for a VFT between Sydney and Canberra, called Speedrail, in the ’90s was eventually refused the extra $1 billion required to get it off the ground by the Howard government. “Had the funding gap been plugged up then we’d have high-speed rail from Central Station to Canberra Airport in 84 minutes,” contends Laird. “There’s a good chance it would have reached Melbourne by now.”
The current project is not Albanese’s first high-speed-rail rodeo. As transport minister in the Gillard government, he ordered a study into high-speed rail along Australia’s east coast, which resulted in a $144-billion plan that also looped in regional stops including the Gold Coast and Shepparton – and which was promptly wound up when the Abbott government came to power.
“We see this very much as a regional economic project … which actually gives you far more benefits than just going from A to B fast.”
Albanese now has a second chance. He set up a High Speed Rail Authority in 2023 and committed $500 million to design and reserve a corridor for a Sydney-to-Newcastle high-speed rail line. The authority’s chief executive, Tim Parker, acknowledges there is “healthy cynicism” about an idea that has been kicked around for four decades. “[But] there’s a whole range of reasons why I think that now is the right time to do this,” he told us.
These reasons include greater appreciation of the need to reduce transport emissions, he says, the need for economic development in regional cities, and even as a solution to the country’s chronic housing shortage. “It’s not just about getting from city to city really fast and going head-to-head with the airlines,” Parker says. “We see this very much as a regional economic project… which actually gives you far more benefits than just going from A to B fast.”
Why is the project starting with Sydney-Newcastle?
Four hours is the proposed high-speed-rail travel time between both Melbourne and Sydney, and Sydney and Brisbane. Sydney to Canberra would take 90 minutes (an hour faster than driving). But the rail authority says the whole plan, if backed, would be unlikely to come together until the 2050s.
For now, with 15 million passengers a year already, the Sydney-Newcastle leg is the priority: it’s the busiest long-distance rail line in the country with trips taking between two hours and 15 minutes and three hours. A fast train, at the proposed 320km/h, would cut the journey to an hour. Novocastrians could commute to Sydney to work with relative ease.
This is despite this section of the line being the trickiest piece of the puzzle. An estimated 115 kilometres in tunnels and 38 kilometres over bridges and viaducts would be built to navigate the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, the Hawkesbury River and the hills along the route.
The rail authority is proposing a two-year development stage to finalise its plans after which it would take 10 to 12 years to build from Newcastle to Sydney Central plus a few years more to reach Western Sydney International Airport – all of which suggests a potential opening in the late 2030s.
Parker believes that a significant share of the Sydney-Melbourne (1½-hour) flight market would shift to trains. “You actually add up the time to get to the airport, get through the airport, get at the other end and four hours is actually very, very competitive if it’s CBD to CBD,” he says.
Isn’t Australia just not suited to high-speed rail?
Sure, Sydney and Melbourne are home to a combined 10.9 million people whereas Tokyo and Osaka have a combined 57 million. But Parker argues that the Brisbane-Melbourne corridor, home to 21.5 million people today, will grow to 28.5 million by 2051 and already has a density of around 104 people per square kilometre – more than Spain (95) and not far from France (124). “Also we’re growing and they’re not growing as fast as us. This is why the time becomes right,” he says.
Professor Andrew McNaughton has worked at the highest levels of Britain’s fast-train network, including as technical director of the under-construction of the HS2 project in London. He has also looked closely at the prospects of fast trains in Australia. He’s enthusiastic about the potential for high-speed rail to link Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane to regional cities within those states. But he pours cold water on the idea of linking our major capital cities – at least for now.
“High-speed rail works best when you put people within an hour-and-a-half of each other, maybe two hours at the most,” he says.
‘People can go and work in other cities without having to shift their kids and everything, and companies have got access to a much bigger pool of people.’
The French town of Lille, for example, has transformed from an “economic backwater to an absolutely thriving city”, he says, after high-speed rail brought it within an hour of Paris. “Firms have moved out to Lille, and there’s lots and lots of high-end jobs, whereas before they were basically mining and warehousing… When you bring those sorts of cities close to each other, you get economic growth. People can go and work in other cities without having to shift their kids and everything, and companies have got access to a much bigger pool of people.”
This is the potential McNaughton saw for NSW when the Berejiklian government commissioned him to develop a high-speed rail strategy for the state in 2018. “It would change NSW from being one mega-city and a few towns, frankly, to a much more balanced economy with people with a much better quality of life.”
Even if a Sydney-Melbourne fast train were to effectively replace air travel, McNaughton says it’s not enough to justify building it. “Replacing planes with trains doesn’t mean that Sydney and Melbourne grow [economically] any more than they would have done anyway.”
And even from an environmental perspective, McNaughton questions whether the carbon emissions saved from replacing air travel between Australia’s two largest cities would be greater than the emissions produced building the new railway. His advice? Get on with building smaller, state-based networks now and leave it to future generations to decide whether it is worth connecting them.
The Australia Bureau of Statistics has forecast the country’s population to grow from 27.6 million today to between 34.3 million and 45.9 million by 2071. Urban planner Joe Langley says finding homes for all those people is the main question to consider when it comes to deciding if Australia needs fast trains. “The main game is how we decide to spread the population over the next 50 to 100 years,” says Langley, who worked on the 2011 federal study and is part of the Australian High Speed Rail Association.
“Our existing urban centres are packed. We’ve got this fantastic regional environment where we can shift some of the population growth and make the cities and regional areas more productive, but we need some way for people to commute.”
Ultimately, Langley says, the biggest risk to the High Speed Rail Authority is what killed every previous fast-rail proposal: the enormous cost. He argues that so-called “value capture” taxes in place to collect a share of the massive increase in property values around new railway stations could cover a significant portion of construction costs. London’s new Elizabeth line, from Essex, east of the city, to Berkshire in the west, covered one-third of its project costs this way.
After more than 40 years of proposals and pipe dreams, is Australia finally ready to embark on a high-speed rail journey? When the Very Fast Train project folded in 1991, its chief executive Alan Castleman bemoaned that “as a nation, we are too inclined to look at the problems rather than the solutions”. High-speed rail may promise some solutions. But with a price tag up to $90 billion for the Sydney-Newcastle leg alone, departure is far from guaranteed.
Get fascinating insights and explanations on the world’s most perplexing topics. Sign up for our weekly Explainer newsletter.
