High Speed Train to Geelong

[glend (Glen)]

Wasn't there a recent discussion about light pollution around Geelong. This could make it worse. I see "he who shall not be named" (due to TOS issues) is spuiking a high speed rail link Melb -Geelong. It will be interesting go see what this does for property prices in Geelong, and further out, as it becomes more of a commuter hub. You will need car parks to house those coming in to commute from further out, etc. Then again, this sort of idea gets rolled out in various areas just before an election.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work...1da4280262d8e5

Excuse my ignorance of things Victorian, but isn't there already a train from Geelong to Melb?

[casstony]

Cutting a 1 hour trip to 35 minutes doesn't seem like a big enough benefit for a 4 billion outlay. I'd rather see them pay down debt and keep something in reserve to spend when the next recession comes along.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

I have trouble seeing how it would be a feasible travel time either, it is an approx 75KM trip from Geelong North (To give it the shortest real travel distance) and Southern Cross station. Excluding any stops and reduced travel speeds in the more urban areas it would need to AVERAGE about 150KMH from end to end. Unless they plan to build it separate tracks, imagine a commuter blowing past a platform at 150KMH plus where it expresses through (Like Derrimut station) I can tell you that a Bombardier train from Ballarat blasting through Rockbank station at maybe 120KMH is pretty imposing! We used to do some rail work and even 10M from the rails it had you unconsciously stepping backwards as it went past.

I have a LOT of trouble accepting the idea that it might burn it's way through the suburbs at 120+ too, due to safety concerns. High speeds through population centers in a vehicle that might take 500M+ to stop in good conditions sounds pretty unlikely.

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

Bullet trains belt through stations in Japan every hour or so.
No issue..

[bojan]

Originally Posted by Merlin66

Bullet trains belt through stations in Japan every hour or so.
No issue..

Yep..

We should look much more at how Japan solved their public transport system issues and problems (then again they have public transport system and we don't...)

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Shouldn't they focus on a train to the airport, rather than just widening the motorway, that always clogs up

[glend (Glen)]

I believe you will find that the Japanese bullet train stations are designed for the bullet train and not legacy platforms from another era. You won't find people standing at a platform edge in a bullet train station. So it seems given that the infrastructure (stations and tracks) will need to be purposely built for a high speed train, which means a new alignment to ease curvature and avoid level crossings, etc. If you look at the various new train systems being built in Sydney, most use new stations, tunneling, and long air bridges.

I am waiting for Elon Musk to offer his Boring Company expertise to do the job. And it really does make some sense to consider the Melb-Geelong link for tunnelling for a significant part of the distance. If you are not stopping at old legacy stations, and why would you as that takes time and energy to do that, then you can tunnel direct and it would likely be cheaper.

I agree with Dunk, Melb needs a good rail link to the airport. Before I retired I had to fly down there once a week to meet with my staff there, and it was a nightmare getting into the city. Honestly sometimes it took longer than the flight itself.

[Nikolas (Nik)]

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

Shouldn't they focus on a train to the airport, rather than just widening the motorway, that always clogs up

Train to the airport is now a thing it is gonna start in the next year the go ahead has been made.

As for a high speed train link to Geelong the issue is not so much the speed of the train because the trains thaat barrel through the lines already do hit up to 120kmh but congestion on the lines nearer the city means the trains can never make use of their full potential.
There is talk of a high speed rail network to Bendigo and Shepparton which would be a better idea

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Originally Posted by glend

I agree with Dunk, Melb needs a good rail link to the airport. Before I retired I had to fly down there once a week to meet with my staff there, and it was a nightmare getting into the city. Honestly sometimes it took longer than the flight itself.

Same here...and I was flying from Brisbane

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

The smart thing to do would be to bolster the arterial lines in Melbourne before it gets too densely populated. The growth is not going to stop, and a good rail system is key to making it bearable for folk that don't wish or can't afford to live closer in.

This is not a novel idea...numerous cities around the world suffer and/or have built systems to try to tackle this problem (admittedly with varying degrees of success).

[casstony]

An alternative way to spend 4 billion: at a cost of say $50 each, 80 million LED street lights could be retrofitted with shielding
The shield is simply a rubber inlay that fits inside the existing cover - very easy to fit.

I just looked up the number of streetlights in the country: 2.3 million, so there's a bit of cash left over.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Originally Posted by Merlin66

Bullet trains belt through stations in Japan every hour or so.
No issue..

Yep, but as was later discussed, the stations/platforms were designed for it. It would take new lines (Which I doubt there is space reserved for) and new designs to keep someone from waking up in a different suburb to their elbow. not to mention situational awareness that so many people seem to lack.

To take Rockbank station as the example again where the Ballarat trains breeze through at speed unless they are stopping there and at even higher speed if they express through the next station as well, the drivers must have their hearts in their mouths every time given there is a rail level pedestrian crossing to get from one platform to the other and people blindly bumble across, coffee in one hand, iphone in the other.

We would need to be a lot further from a design legacy that seems to be related to the steam era for it to work. Even the newer stations like Tarneit (I called it Derrimut before which is not right, working from memory) the platform is completely open right to the edge, inches from the trains. Imagine a train expressing through there at even 100KMH! If you were on the road doing 100 and saw someone standing 500mm from the edge of the lane looking at their phone you would be unlikely to keep on at 100, and drivers in cars can swerve as well as brake, something a train driver can't do. they can only hit the emergency brakes and hope there is not a thud.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Originally Posted by The_bluester

We would need to be a lot further from a design legacy that seems to be related to the steam era for it to work. Even the newer stations like Tarneit (I called it Derrimut before which is not right, working from memory) the platform is completely open right to the edge, inches from the trains. Imagine a train expressing through there at even 100KMH! If you were on the road doing 100 and saw someone standing 500mm from the edge of the lane looking at their phone you would be unlikely to keep on at 100, and drivers in cars can swerve as well as brake, something a train driver can't do. they can only hit the emergency brakes and hope there is not a thud.

Maybe it’s different in Victoria, but in the rest of the world, we call it natural selection

Back in the country that invented them, trains chug through stations at 200km/h...they paint a yellow line on the platform and post signs... “High speed trains pass this platform. Stand back from the platform edge, behind the yellow line”. And they have a much greater population density and train ridership than anywhere in Australia, without regular clean-up events.

[Wavytone]

That isn’t the issue.

The real problem is the $$,$$$,$$$,$$$ to build it, and how to fund it long term. In Australia the population centres are too small, by 2-3 orders of magnitude, and high speed rail is quite simply an impossible pipe dream.

Here we’d be lucky to fill 1 service a day, which means high speed rail simply isn’t viable financially.

By way of comparison China has cities of 20M people about 300km apart, and runs services at 20minute intervals 24 hours a day - and all seats are fully booked. That’s what makes high speed rail possible.

Their average routes are short enough that aircraft cannot compete, and the population centres are so large they guarantee every seat is filled, 24 x 7 x 20 minute services. That’s what makes it work.

Melbournes population would have to be 30+M and that of Geelong 20M. Likewise Shepparton or Ballarat. Not going to happen anytime soon.

[raymo]

Here in good old dark ages Perth the trains on some lines run down the
centre of the freeway, isolating them from people, and non stoppers go through the stations between 100 and 120, and nobody on a platform has been hit yet. We also have the yellow lines.
raymo

[JeniSkunk (Jenifur)]

Originally Posted by Wavytone

Here we’d be lucky to fill 1 service a day, which means high speed rail simply isn’t viable financially.

I disagree.
Australia's busiest air corridors are the Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne triangle.
Sydney Melbourne is one of the world's busiest air routes.
So do Sydney Melbourne first, then extend it to Sydney Brisbane, and then finally Brisbane Melbourne.
After that, maybe Sydney Canberra and Melbourne Canberra

[raymo]

Some of your numbers are a bit over the top Wavy, but you are certainly on the right track[groan]. Almost all of China's HST routes are at least 1000klm
long, and some are considerably longer. What makes them viable, as you said,is the moderate distances between cities of 5-10 million people, so that very few people travel more than a fairly small part of the route. For an HST network to be viable, it just needs moderately sized towns and cities at
convenient distances apart,and train frequency adjusted to suit, as is the case with HSTs in many parts of the world, especially Europe, but alas, we don't even have that in the Eastern part of Oz, and forget the western part. The Chinese system is probably unique, in that when their government decided that they wanted an HST system, they built a system that in parts use existing lines upgraded as far as possible, and in other parts used new dedicated HS lines, resulting in different sections having different speed
limits, some lines are 250, some 300, and some 350. They also built in a
hurry, resulting in a high speed crash a while ago, and they had to spend enormous sums of money to fix the problems.
Sydney to Melbourne with no more than a couple of fairly equidistant
stops, making a trip of less than 3hrs, might work. The airlines would hate it though. That reminds me of when the open road in the U.K. was
unlimited, newly built buses used to travel up and down the just opened M1
motorway at a cruise of 160kph, Then 200kph Intercity trains started running from the major cities to London, and almost simultaneously the
open roads were limited to 70mph[about 115kph], and all the high speed
buses went out of business almost overnight Epistle finished.
raymo

[Wavytone]

Dream on, Raymo. Not going to happen on my lifetime and probably not yours.

What will bring rail back into pre-eminence is when oil starts to run out, and the price per litre rises 3-5 times what is now. Only then will high speed rail make any financial sense.

And by the way you will be sailing to Europe, 1-2 months each way.

Air travel will be for rock stars, thugby stars and politicians - not mere mortals. As it was in the 1950s before the Boeing 707.

[garymck (Gary)]

It will never happen, just a pre election bit of BS that comes up in this area whenever there is an election.... Has been promised several times that I've heard of...
Gary
Geelong
PS The reasons why we don't have a rail link to Melbourne Airport are fairly well known, and trace back to Jeff Kennet's deal for protecting the toll roads profit.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Originally Posted by garymck

PS The reasons why we don't have a rail link to Melbourne Airport are fairly well known, and trace back to Jeff Kennet's deal for protecting the toll roads profit.

Not a political comment as I’m largely ignorant of individuals like that, but it’s disgraceful that that should be allowed to persist to current day. Melbourne does itself no favours in this respect. The airport link in Perth will be finished next year (the dark ages clearly leapt forward, raymo )