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Australia is huge, but everyone lives in 7 cities (within a margin of error). A high speed rail that covered Melbourne/Albury/Canberra/Sydney/Newcastle/Tamworth?/Brisbane would have a huge impact.

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.

One more: later, trains will be faster. In the 20 years that I've been in Madrid time to my hometown has come down from 5.5 to little more than 4 hours.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by...: it’s actually under 70% of the population in the top 7 cities in that list, with the two giants being Sydney and Melbourne with 20% each. 30% is a fairly large rounding error! :-)

I agree with your judgement in general, nonetheless.

That 30% rounding error are people who don't have any interest in travelling to major cities.

Giving mobility to those people would unlock new use cases of its own, but the GP post is actually accurate to commercial reality.

Perth doesn't count as a major city? (% of that 30% live within its metro area. This isn't to say the 7-city grid is a bad idea, but your statement is inaccurate.

Perth is number 4 on the above list..?

Perth (and Darwin) are essentally islands of their own.

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

Last time when I checked, the 11km South West Rail Link in Sydney took 6 years to complete. 12 years after Kevin Rudd promised to build NBN for everyone, after billions of tax $ already spent, my places in inner west Sydney and inner south east Melbourne are still not connected to NBN.

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.

> it might become more interesting to dig long tunnels under cities for these trains rather than increasing the train's maximum speed.

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.

Berlins main station as well, there are 4 tracks underground.

High-speed rail also works well in China.

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.

> There are only 25 million people in Australia though.

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.

China's population is concentrated in one part of the country. That makes it easier to serve them more efficiently with mass transit. This isn't true for the United States. The population resides on the coasts, which you can serve with high-speed rail, but connecting the two coasts with the inland population centers via rail is a much, much bigger project.

Yes, this excuse has been given for the past 50 years. Usually, in reference to Europe.

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.

People also want the federal government to fund the construction of this infrastructure, which is a very hard sell (and possibly unconstitutional) if you don't average all of those states in some way. Most of the opposition to Amtrak and existing infrastructure projects like the Gateway Project is coming from those states, who don't see improving rail service in the Mid-Atlantic and New England as something they want their tax money spent on.

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.

The federal government funded the highway system.

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

I tried a simple estimate on how much a HSR line would cost from Chicago to Denver. About $20-30 billion. It's a 1000 miles of flat nothing, so it's cheap per mile.

Chicago --> St Louis --> Kansas City --> Denver is about 1000 miles.

Building a railway from coast to coast has already been done in the 19th century. An HSR line is just a railway line built to higher standards:

- 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.

High speed lines can have steeper profiles than normal lines because the greater kinetic energy and loco power makes them less troubled by slopes. Eg this compares the profiles of the old Paris-Lyon route with LGV Sud-Est:

http://www.railfaneurope.net/tgv/images/misc/profilln1.jpg

Even better. Though this particular example compares the difference between a general-purpose railway line designed for steam traction and a passenger line for electric ones.

Here in the UK we enjoy low speed trains every day. ;)

Just seeing this stuff in other countries really makes me sad about how my countries technological developments have been left to rot.

Every time I visit London, I'm puzzled by the seeming paradox.

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.

The reason the British Empire flourished is because, well, the British Empire flourished.

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.

To be fair, robbing indigenous people at gun point is a very profitable endeavor and why Britain flourished.

Fact: There is no chance of Britian reaching its former greatness without this crucial criminal component.

Fact: that was made up

You may not know the economic history of Britain, if you disagree.

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.

Not the issue. The made-up part was, that's the only way for Britain to move back up in the world. So many ways for that to happen - tech, information, space, diplomacy to name a few.

The Victorians generally did not give a crap about "old" stuff and willfully and frequently built/rebuilt/demolished/dug-up/forced-out pretty much whatever they wanted or was in their way to get stuff done. They also had a large and cheap labor force with questionable safety protections.

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.

On the labour point.. it still doesn't make sense to me. Sure, they had very poor oh&s but they also used shovels to dig and baskets to remove fill. It just doesn't seem like the extra cost of safe work practices could possibly offset the productive bump from machinery.

Hmm well its not soooooo bad - 185mph/300kmh for High Speed 1 (1), with High Speed 2 (2) under construction at the moment (in some parts of the coutnry anyway) and pegged at 250mph/400kph (2).

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

London to Edinburgh or Glasgow is about 4.5 hours which is probably about the same as on the plane, YMMV.

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.

The UK has particularly frequent trains compared to its continental neighbours.

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.

> 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.

It has to slow down anyway if it wants to stop.

I laughed, good point.

You could lose a car on the back for departing passengers and pick one up on the front for embarking one’s. Only a bit of loss in kinetic energy needed (to slow down the last car and get the first car up to speed).

Interesting idea, but there are some issues:

- 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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC3

> it might become more interesting to dig long tunnels under cities for these trains rather than increasing the train's maximum speed.

South Korea built >50 km tunnel out of Seoul for this reason. It opened in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulhyeon_Tunnel

> 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

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.

Note that, as I understand it, the security checks and queues for Chinese high-speed trains are comparable to those required at airports elsewhere if not worse.

For what it's worth I've traveled on them about 15 times over the last few years, mostly to or from Shanghai and while it's comparable I'd say it's still way easier than an airport. At a glance though it definitely looks very crowded though because there is only one very large departure lounge (at least in Shanghai). In the smaller cities though you don't have the same crowds and the whole process is very quick and easy.

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.

Not really. It’s basically a metal detector conveyer belt out front with very little flow control, fast to get through and not much thought going into finding anything. Compared to airport security, it’s a breeze (but it might have changed since 2016?).

The biggest issue for HSR is straightened track, which should be possible in Australia as far as I can tell: not many mountains, kind of empty between cities.

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.

And Spain with the AVE and Talgos