I really wish we had high speed rail in Australia. I'd pick a 600km/h train over a plane any day.
This would make sense along coasts though but you wouldn't be able to cross the country from sea to sea in a few hours of course.
What's good with trains is that you can hop in at the very last moment (when the bell rings, happened to me a couple times) and the train stops in the center of cities, instead of the suburbs. This is the main reason why high speed train in France can compete with airplanes when crossing the country. By plane I must first reach the airport (30 mins), have some time ahead before embarking (30 mins), the flight is 1 hour long but the time to actually take off and pick back your luggages it's almost 2 hours long, and then you have to reach the center of your destination city (30 mins). By my generous estimates, it takes 3h30 to travel by plane North/South in France vs 4 hours by train.
And because currently not every railroad segment can support high speed trains going at full velocity (but work is in progress) it could take 3 hours. 300 km/h
Also note that Amdahl's law [1] applies in this context (there are diminishing returns in optimizing the speed of only one segment of the full path) and travelling the last kilometers accounts for a significant portion of the travel time.
For instance the TGV has to slow down when entering cities (because of the noise) and at some point in the development of the high speed rail network, it might become more interesting to dig long tunnels under cities for these trains rather than increasing the train's maximum speed.
The distances are (as the crow flies): Melbourne-Albury: 260km Albury-Canberra: 219km Canberra-Sydney: 247km Sydney-Newcastle: 117km Newcastle-Tamworth: 219km Tamworth-Brisbane: 450km
That last leg might need another break in it.
But at 300kph average speed that's 2.5 hours Melbourne - Sydney (CBD-CBD), say 3.5 hours with stopovers.
To get to Sydney for a 9:00 start in the CBD from Melbourne now takes (CBD - CBD): Taxi: 30m + 1hr check in + 1.5 hour flight + 30m taxi: 3.5 hours.
I'd take the train any day. Space, able to work, sleep, dining car etc. Not affected by weather or other airport backlogs. You still get up at a god-awful time of the morning, but the actual travel would be much more tolerable.
I agree with your judgement in general, nonetheless.
Giving mobility to those people would unlock new use cases of its own, but the GP post is actually accurate to commercial reality.
Perth-Adelaide (nearest major metro) is 2,131km air mles, over the Great Austrailian Bight (ocean). Land route is 2,695 km (1,675 mi).
Darwin-Brisbane is even further: 2,848 km by air, 3,425 km by ground (2,128 mi).
By 300 kph HSR, those are 7+ hour trips, vs about 3 by air. And those are nearest-nighbour trips.
There is effectively no population between either location -- unless somehow induced (a possibility), a high-speed rail service would have tpo rely on endpoint-traffic only. Climate, economy, and ag productivity (low) make development unlikely.
https://www.distancecalculator.net/from-perth-to-adelaide
https://www.distancecalculator.net/from-brisbane-to-darwin
By contrast, the southeastern zone of Adelaide-Melbourne-Canberra-Sydny-Brisbane, is compact with five major metros over 1,601 km (air), though the ground route is still 2,005 km (1,246 mi).
https://www.distancecalculator.net/from-adelaide-to-brisbane
And still, the only HSR corridor that's been seriously considered is SydneyMelbourne. Quite validly.
Australia is almost wholly empty space.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/-24.921/134.272
Populations:
Perth: 2m
Adelaide: 1.7m
Melbourne: 5m
Canberra: 0.4m
Sydney: 5.2m
Brisbane: 3.6m (metro area)
Darwin: 0.1m
Edit: last hour is not high speed because the rails are regular ones (the train adapts in a ten minutes stop) so the high speed interval went from 4.5 down to 3.
If anyone asks me how long will it take to build the Melbourne to Sydney high speed rail, my honest answer would be 30-50 years.
That’s actually part of what the Stuttgart 21 project is doing, and why it’s so expensive (it’s not just a train station): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
They’re building several massive tunnels below the city and through the surrounding mountains to put the entire station and all rails underground, which also improves travel times on the Paris—Vienna magistrale.
Being one of the first major projects of that kind in Germany, it has to deal with massive budget overruns and delays.
It’s the same size as the United States, which is about the size of Australia. There are only 25 million people in Australia though.
That might explain why they’re building 25,000 miles of high-speed rail in China, but it doesn’t address why the US has zero.
You’re being sort of vague with the numbers of course.
If you actually look at population densities in Spain, for example, and compare them to California or New York, what do you think we’d find?
For some reason, people like yourself want to average Montana, North Dakota, California, and New York. The US does not have a uniform population density.
We need to fix that problem, and that means not simply writing them off as irrelevant because of their lack of population. Australia is likely facing the same problem.
There are 350 million Americans. Do you know who pays most of the taxes to the federal government? It’s not the people in the mid-West.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_tax_revenue_by_state
Chicago --> St Louis --> Kansas City --> Denver is about 1000 miles.
- larger curve radiuses (spelling?). Not much of a factor when a line mostly crosses sparsely populated, flat areas.
- less steep inclines (but if a steam engine can climb an incline, so should every modern train)
- Switches that allow high speeds on the diverging branch. But again, if the population is sparse, you don't need many of them.
And when building a part of the line to HSR standards is too expensive, the HSR train just turns into a regular train while using it. The only part that's expensive even if the geography is great is electrification (having to carry fuel or batteries limits your speed).
Switzerland does not use HSR despite prioritizing rail. I couldn't find numbers, but AFAIK it's very densely populated if you exclude the uninhabitable parts of the alps. Germany is slightly less densely populated and does use HSR. France has less than half the density and its HSR is significantly faster than Germany's. It does not look like HSR requires a high population density. The opposite is the case: HSR works better when it can go long distances without stopping and re-accelerating.
And even if HSR does not make sense everywhere, that is not a reason not to use it where it does.
There are a "couple" more million people in France, and there are many areas in the US and Europe which much higher population than Australia, and a fraction of its size.
Just seeing this stuff in other countries really makes me sad about how my countries technological developments have been left to rot.
That system was dug in the 1800s, when light-bulbs and bicycles were still in beta. Over 150 years later, a project like that is out of reach for nearly all western cities. It's like the "we can't go to the moon anymore." It just offends my/our intuition about progress.
These days we spend a lot of effort on "preserving" older things, you cant just railroad (pun intended!) your way through a suburb demolishing things to lay railway tracks more or less where you want, and obviously there is a lot more focus now on individual worker safety (for the better).
I guess they were able to build things during the "wild west" where rules, procedures, , respect for individual rights & safety, and laws had not yet caught up with industrialisation.
The industrial revolution began in the UK, the engineering of the time was lead by the British.
So yes, London got the tube, it got sewerage, it got all wonders of public facility because it was a win-win. Proclaimed the glory of the Empire to keep others in check and provide the people with the spoils of Empire.
Fact: There is no chance of Britian reaching its former greatness without this crucial criminal component.
Peak of British economy was after it invaded/sabotaged/drugged/then robbed two of the richest civilizations at that point (accounting for 50% of world GDP) China & India.
The beginning of British decline started in the early 1900s with the end of the opium trade (which at its peak, in ~1895, accounted for 35% of Britain's GDP)
Do you think UK, China, India, US, Germany, etc... placed at the same starting point, would result in UK economic victory without foul play?
UK can't even beat California on many economic metrics after centuries of historical advantages, lol.
London-Edinburgh is old and goes at about 125mph/200kmh. London-Glasgow is slightly-less old (in terms of trains) and does 120mph/225kmh).
Suburban trains are slower of course, but they stop pretty frequently anyway.
tl;dr - its not terrible. Prices are high though so flying is often orders of magnitude cheaper, even in the "door to door" time is about the same or slightly less by train.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2
For example, there is a train every 20 minutes from London to Manchester (320km), but only one train per hour from Berlin to Hamburg¹.
This is part of the reason for the higher prices.
¹ There are slightly more, but they are slower such that it's not worth using them.
The problem in this country is that going into/out London is pretty well covered by trains, but going anywhere else, unless it happens to be in a London bound route, is a bit of lottery.
It has to slow down anyway if it wants to stop.
- Many modern trains, including the TGV, are not designed to be separated during normal operation.
- If you add a car to the front, the train driver can't see anything. If you remove it, you remove their workplace. In a push-pull train, the same applies to the back.
A foldable cab like the IC3[1] has might be a solution, but it's far from aerodynamic.
- Uncoupling the last cab instead of stopping has been done in the past. But coupling one without stopping sounds very hard.
- Instead of one train, you now have three: The car being decoupled, the new one, and the rest. Generally, that means the station needs a higher capacity. Not sure if that's the case here though. Normally what limits a station's capacity is that you can't have two trains using the same track, but that doesn't really apply when you want to couple/uncouple them.
South Korea built >50 km tunnel out of Seoul for this reason. It opened in 2016.
And then there is the inevitable delays before the plane will be allowed to take off and if you're lucky the same before you're allowed to land.
And in NL, if you land on Schiphol if you're particularly unlucky they will land the plane on the 5th strip which is more accurately located in Haarlem and it takes about 15 minutes to taxi to the gate.
Security involves putting your bags on a conveyor that goes through an x-ray machine but no one actually has their bags opened so it moves quickly. Boarding is much quicker because a train has a lot more doors than an airplane.
However the queues to get to the metro/subway/underground system can indeed be horrifically long.
This is also why’s hSR is so that impressive in China, they had none of those advantages sand had to keep blasting through mountains.
Ultimately though, these routes are pretty well serviced by flights. These trains are pretty amazing, but not cheaper or faster than flights.
Sounds like a good way for Australia to decrease its CO2 emissions would be to subsidize the track and try to get the air travelers to move over.
Costs.. agreed in theory. But in practice, modern low cost airlines supported by efficient airports are very hard to beat on price. There are economies of scale here too. Very best case scenario, HSTs are similar in price and convenience and it's a matter of taste.
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We have a saying: "Not complaining is enough praise."
That would let them get away too easily.
- It was split up. For example, the tracks and the rolling stock are owned by different companies. All these companies are owned by a holding and all use the DB brand, but they independently try to make a profit.
That makes sense to economists trying to let the market organize as much as possible, but not to railway employees trying to run a railway. For example: before, the Bundesbahn built its infrastructure, balancing cost vs needs. Now, the infrastructure company optimizes for its own profit and cuts corners, no matter how much the companies operating the trains have to spend to compensate.
- The government was planning to sell it on the stock market. In preparation, DB neglected its infrastructure to appear more profitable. Fortunately these plans were dropped, but the damage is done.
Another insane decision that still contributes to this neglect: Maintenance is funded by the DB. Construction is funded by the Ministry of Transportation[1]. So the DB neglects infrastructure until it has to be replaced.
- Probably the worst one: It competes with cars and trucks. The automobile industry is very powerful in Germany. Properly funding the DB would lower their profits so it doesn't happen.
[1] and Digital Infrastructure. Yes, our ministry of transportation is responsible for the information highway. I am not making this up.
Or there may be cultural differences between the railway companies. Maybe one company is staffed by hard workers who are motivated by working at a state-owned railway rather than for some capitalist that isn't them and would be offended if you introduced competition hoping to get them to work harder. The other could be staffed by lazy bums who find working for the state distasteful and do need a kick in the arse.
Forcing a split could also cause other reforms that outweigh the damage the split causes.
Why is it boarding a train is 10x easier than on a plane?