Ideas to improve on and expand existing rail networks have come too late and rather than spending billions of dollars on the nation’s oil-hungry infrastructure, investments should have been in rail, not what are now dead-end roads.
The money sunk into our roads has spawned an intricate web of implicated industries all of which depend upon the survival and enhancement of this infrastructure.
Had we adopted a different emphasis, we would now have a wholly different range and type of sustainable industries wrapped around an equally sustainable rail network – we wouldn’t have any fewer jobs, rather different jobs.
Recently it was reported that Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, had been told that a fast rail link between Sydney and Melbourne was not viable as it couldn’t compete with air travel in terms of speed and so wouldn’t attract enough travellers.
However, report criteria seems to overlook the world’s quickly vanishing oil supplies that will make air and road travel prohibitively expensive and by default enhance the mass movement of people and freight by rail, even though it might be slower.
Projected costs of $110 million a kilometre for the high speed train network will be cheap when considered retrospectively from among the ruins of a nation that failed to take timely action as the world’s oil supplies began to run dry.
Our attention should, however, be on more than one train running along Australia’s east coast and be expanded to take in the country’s entire rail network.
The Goulburn Valley’s railway lines should be rebuilt or refurbished and our links to and from Melbourne, for both freight and passengers, should be fast, frequent and stylish to make it our preferred mode of travel.
Short of an innovative and as yet unknown technology filling the industrial and lifestyle chasm that oil scarcity will reveal, an improved and enhanced rail network will enable us to maintain business as usual, for a while at least.
