Published in The New Citizen, February 2002
Australia’s rail sector must
be revolutionised, both
for the sake of transport within
our country, and also to tie
Australia into the rest of the
world, in particular into the
world’s greatest population
centres, at the eastern and south-eastern Asian terminals
of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
This revolution will have two
axes: Prof. Endersbee’s proposal
for a Melbourne-Darwin
Asian Express, and a vast upgrading and expansion of
Australia’s rail network centring
upon the new magnetic
levitation (mag-lev) rail technology
pioneered in Germany,
and which is now being
built in China.
Our nation’s rail sector at
present is a pathetic shambles,
so bad that the 2001 Australian Infrastructure Report
Card prepared by the Institution
of Engineers, Australia,
a very conservative,
understated body, rates it at
D-, with the crucial Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane rail corridor rating an F, due to
“poor track co-ordination,
steam age alignments and inadequate
signalling and
communications systems.”
With the exception of rail
lines built expressly to service
mineral deposits, most of
Australia’s rail system was
built at the turn of the 20th
Century. The report of the
federal Parliament’s Standing
Committee on Communications,
Transport and Microeconomic
Reform, Tracking
Australia warned in
1998, “Without urgent and
substantial investment in this
infrastructure, major sections
of the national rail network
are likely to become irretrievable
within ten years. In
this context, the rationale for
increased investment in rail
infrastructure has to be about
averting the potentially enormous
costs of diminished or
defunct rail services between
major cities on the eastern
seaboard, including increased
road construction and maintenance, and the
negative externalities associated
with large and growing
volumes of road traffic.”
That report was three years
ago, and, under privatisation
and competition policy with
the exception of the beginning
construction of the Alice
Springs-Darwin railroad,
the rail system has not improved
significantly since.
The “negative externalities”
in the report refer to the horrible
figure of $15 billion per
year lost in road accidents on
overcrowded, deteriorating
roads along with an estimated
$13 billion annual loss
due to congestion, which is
expected to rise to $30 billion
by 2015. Only a tiny
fraction of the nation’s passenger
traffic moves by rail,
and, since 1975, rail’s share
of interstate non-bulk freight
has declined from 60% to
35%, even as the trucking
industry is suffering record
rates of bankruptcies and
psychological and health problems
associated with
horrific working hours. Between
1975 and 2001 the
Federal Government spent
$43 billion on roads and a
miniscule $2 billion on rail,
even though for medium and
long distance, rail is an inherently
much more efficient
mode of transport. Therefore,
we must plan to spend some
tens of billions on the industry
over the next ten years,
both in upgrading existing
lines, but in particular in
building the Asian Express
and a mag-lev grid tying together
all of our major population
centres.
The Asian Express
Development Corridors
A Maglev rail system
Go Vacumn Maglev! (Published August 30, 2011)
