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Why Can’t Australia Get a Melbourne-Sydney Bullet Train?

Australia has been discussing an east coast bullet train for 20 years. Why is the project still no closer to reality?
The Shinkansen Bullet Train. Image via Flickr user Gemma Davies

Melbourne and Sydney are about 900 kilometres apart. According to Google Maps it takes nine hours to travel that distance by car. This is why seven million Australians make the journey by air every year, a trip taking just under an hour and a half. And that's all fine if you live close to either of those airports — but what about the rural communities living between those two cities?

Air travel cuts down on journey times, but it does little to connect Australia's east coast. If you live north of Melbourne and south of Sydney, and you need to get to either place without driving, the obvious choice would be a train. The problem isthe trains that do connect those towns sometimes have to slow to 15 km/ph due to ageing infrastructure.This all begs the question: why are bullet trains still not a thing?

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In April 2013, the Australian government released a study on running an east coast bullet train down a 1,750 kilometre land corridor that would link Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne. The A$20 million study revealed that building a fully operational rail by 2065, with stations at the Gold Coast, Casino, Grafton, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Taree, Newcastle, Southern Highlands, Wagga Wagga, Albury Wodonga, and Shepparton, would cost A$114 billion.

At full operation, the proposed high-speed rail network would carry 84 million passengers a year with express journey times totalling less than three hours between Melbourne and Sydney, the same as between Sydney and Brisbane. When you take travel time to the airport into account — as well as check-in times, baggage handling, security, and boarding — the three hour train journey from Melbourne to Sydney looks pretty appealing. But despite this, the results of the study have been left to stagnate, much like the proposed land corridor identified by the then Federal Labor government.

Sydney's unusually picturesque airport. Image via Flickr user Ebroh

To get an idea of why this is, VICE spoke to Tim Bohm from Bullet Train for Australia — a political party with one policy. According to Tim the whole reason Australia is yet to see a bullet train is lobbying by the airlines. "Qantas makes two thirds of its money from its domestic routes," he explains. "And Qantas is at the big end of town — all the ministers and the lobby groups are all making sure it doesn't happen. To get a bullet train we need every level of government, from council through to state, through to federal."

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Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has dismissed high-speed rail in the past, arguing that a second airport in Sydney — such as the proposed airport at Wynton, 80 kilometres southwest of the city — is the only way to meet growing demand between Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, when you consider that the Melbourne-Sydney route is in the top five busiest airline routes in the world, and has been for the past 15 years, you can see why a high-speed rail is so unappealing to the national carriers.

The toss up between extra airports or new trains is not a new one. Since the 1990s a high-speed rail line linking Sydney to Canberra has been bandied around as a way of allowing Sydney's commuters to use Canberra's airport. This of course didn't eventuate, although a Wynton airport would also need a high-speed train, which would likely surpass the estimated 57-minute trip on the proposed Canberra line.

Cute but slow. Image via Flickr user antony stuart

However the real reason Australian high-speed rail has never got up isn't so much resistance by the major political parties, but rather an unwillingness to sign off on the project's startling price tag. $114 billion is not the kind of money you find under your couch. On the other hand, Japan's national GDP actually grew in sync with bullet train profits since the inception of the revolutionary Shinkansen. When JR Central opened a new bullet train station in the Shinagawa district of southern Tokyo in 2003, huge increases in development occurred near Shinagawa station with property prices growing at 1.5 times the rate of Tokyo prices overall.

Maurice Newman, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's Business Advisory Council, has previously said that the same growth would happen for rural regions along the proposed high speed rail corridor, and rural areas such as Shepparton in Victoria or Goulburn in NSW would especially benefit. As he announced during a visit to Japan in October last year, "these places would suddenly acquire a life of their own and take some of the pressure off [airports in] major urban centres."

To see whether this evangelical perception of trains is shared by the aviation industry, I spoke to independent aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas. He concedes that while a high speed rail network "would alleviate the pressure on airports," the overall price tag would be probative. "The cost to build a train like that would be horrendous," he said. "It just doesn't make economic sense to build a train that costs over 100 billion dollars."

As it stands Treasurer Joe Hockey seems reluctant to even comment on the project, but others might be stirring. As mentioned, the 50th aniversary of the Shinkansen last October inspired interest from a number of players including former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, who argued "build it and they will use it." And if that's not good enough for Australia's airlines, they could possibly follow Lufthansa's lead. In 2011 they discontinued domestic flights between Cologne and Frankfurt and instead leased a carriage on the fast train between the two cities. If you can't beat them, join 'em.

Follow David on Twitter: @davidallegretti