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A secret review of high-speed rail options for New South Wales is understood to prioritise lines to Newcastle and Wollongong at speeds of up to 250km/h, but ranks the much-vaunted Sydney to Canberra route as a lower priority.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the findings today but said it had not seen the report.
The Guardian has spent two years attempting to obtain the strategy under the NSW government’s freedom of information laws and is now awaiting a decision of the NSW civil administrative tribunal.
The government has been resisting the release of the work on faster rail undertaken by Prof Andrew McNaughton in 2018 and 2019. The report, excluding expenses, cost $390,000.
Led by McNaughton, the strategy canvassed four routes for faster rail nominated by the government: south to Wollongong and Nowra, north to Newcastle and the Hunter, west to Bathurst, Orange and Parkes, and south-west to Goulburn and Canberra.
In an interview with the Herald, McNaughton, who is chair of the UK’s Network Rail High Speed and a former technical adviser to the country’s HS2 rail scheme, said his research had established that linking Newcastle and Wollongong to Sydney by fast rail would “change the face of NSW”.
Such a project would require new track, he said, with tunnels under suburban Sydney. The aim was to put Newcastle and Sydney within an hour of each other, which would mean speeds of up to 250km/h. “You go as fast as you need to, not as fast as you can,” he said.
The few documents that have been released to the Guardian by the Department of Enterprise, Investment and Trade reveal McNaughton’s approach to evaluating light rail.
McNaughton argues that governments should focus on human behaviour and the time people are prepared to spend travelling for different purposes, rather than on speeds and technologies of trains.
A presentation by McNaughton from March 2019 on the HS2 network in Britain, which was released to the Guardian, highlighted fast rail as a catalyst for growth, and as a catalyst to drive productivity. Businesses were able to move to cities with lower costs, such as Birmingham, but still access major markets such as London.
A 30-minute journey created a single city and allowed spontaneous meetings, the presentation says.
A 60-minute journey allowed “practical commuting” and created a common pool of skilled people and a merged technology market.
A journey of 120 minutes, on the other hand, was the practical radius for regular leisure expeditions and for ready access to specialists such as lawyers and doctors.
Notes from an April 2019 panel meeting, stress the importance of station placement.
The international experience showed the importance of a seamless interchange off the fast rail mode on to other rail lines. In a city as large as Sydney, the service needs to go into the centre and the outskirts of the city, the notes say.
In its recently released Future Transport strategy, the government appears to be contemplating terminating fast rail services at Parramatta.
On station locations, the document says “there is no golden rule for the distance between stations around the edge of the city, only that the design should try to achieve the most benefit to the most number of people, based on a detailed understanding of the underlying transport network”.
The panel agreed that they needed to take account of the NSW settlement strategy, which talks about the three metropolises of Sydney as part of the thinking on the train network.
The document reveals that by 2019 the government had progressed to shortlisting four options the Sydney to Newcastle line and six options for Sydney to Canberra.
The Sydney to Wollongong line was proving more challenging because of the geographical constraints between Campbelltown and Wollongong such as the water catchment, national parks and the escarpment.
Tunnelling will be required for all options except perhaps the western line, which is likely to make the project very expensive.
The cost of the project may be one reason why the government has so far baulked at committing to the project. The HS2 project in the UK, running to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, was initially budgeted at £55bn but has risen to between £72bn and £98bn.
McNaughton expressed his frustration to the Herald about the lack of progress on faster rail in NSW, saying the strategy was due to be released just before former premier Gladys Berejiklian resigned in 2021. He said he had also been asked to record a launch video a few months ago but it too had not seen the light of day.
The Goulburn and Canberra route would “make a difference” but should not be a top priority, while to the west, “people just need a decent train service”. This could be achieved through selective track upgrades at a fairly modest cost.
“In my book, you’ve got to fix the corridor between Sydney and the Hunter,” he said. “That [would make] the biggest difference to the biggest number of people.”
McNaughton said Wollongong was also “a city which could be much, much more” than it is right now, and the whole south coast would be transformed by high-speed rail.
Australians have recently rushed to use cheaper interstate train travel due to the skyrocketing cost of air travel. Patronage has more than doubled in recent months and services between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are routinely booked to capacity.
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