The gulf between public needs and private wants warrants discussion

Public transport comes in many
 forms and next to walking and
 cycling it is clearly the most
 efficient way to move
 people about.

People of the Goulburn Valley need to gather and talk about the gulf between public needs and private wants.

Both are many, but it is the former to which any reasonable, decent, thoughtful and community-minded person will acknowledge the most important.

Sadly, our individualistic and consumerist world has a slavish devotion to the latter, a perverse privatization that gives rise to despair and a largely unacknowledged and invisible inequality.

Many argue that we can only deal with society as it is or with what exists and although that might be an accepted philosophy today, it wasn’t when we abandoned, almost entirely, our rail network and decided the future belonged to the combustion engine, effectively the motor car.

The Goulburn Valley of the mid-1940s had a wonderful rail network, but gradually was dismantled as private wants prevailed over public needs.

We wrongly chose not to build-on our existing rail infrastructure, but pursue a privately energised idea, the motor car; a concept that has evolved to actually become a public disservice and in just 100 years has left a legacy contrary to human needs.

The purchase of a car is a private decision, but its use and convenience depends, almost entirely, upon a publicly funded infrastructure.

The era of the car is ending with the oil upon which it depends becoming prohibitively expensive to extract and deliver to users, as is the maintenance of the road network and without either the motor car has no reason.

It is time to gather and discuss how we can get thousands of road users back onto a tightly networked public transport system that would be vastly more energy efficient; enrich and strengthen linked communities; trigger a host of new job opportunities; be safer; and make a significant contribution to reducing the Goulburn Valley’s carbon dioxide emissions.

The idea of public transport contrasts with the modern market-driven individualism that has prevailed for decades to become an imagined part of our wellbeing, both emotionally and physically.

Rather than responding to Australia’s spacious geography, we should be consolidating our towns and cities; living close to our work; using a bicycle, or walking; negotiating our towns and cities on a tightly integrated public transport system of buses with light rail running as frequently as hourly between Goulburn Valley towns to connect with trains that unite us with all other destinations.

Establishing an integrated public transport network will be complex, difficult and expensive, but we must start now for as the world’s oil becomes increasingly scarce and subsequently expensive, it will be equally increasingly difficult to build the network upon which the future of the Goulburn Valley will depend.

That is “what” we need and now we need to gather and figure our “how” we do it.

Oil scarcity will make high speed train viable

The tyranny of oil scarcity will force the viability of a high speed rail (below) network along Australia’s east coast.

And that moment, despite the views of many skeptics, will be upon us sooner than imagined.
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.

Easter Satuday picnic train

A train trip that was not only back in time, but also to Tocumwal was enjoyed by hundreds of people on Easter Saturday.
The nine carriage-long Tocumwal picnic train carried passengers from Seymour, picked up many more at Shepparton and then journeyed onto the small town just north of the River Murray.
Tocumwal was once a major rail junction, being the place where mis-matched Victorian and New South Wales rail gauges met and passengers changed trains.
Fortunately trains from Victoria can still terminate at Tocumwal, but the New South Wales network has now deteriorated to the point where its use is no longer possible.
The Easter Saturday train was one that has been salvaged, restored by the Seymour Railway Heritage Centre and at least kept in service for outings such as the Easter Saturday picnic train to Tocumwal.
Some of the cars on the Easter train were more than 100 years old and several others were first used in 1930s and had been a part of the historic Spirit of Progress, a train that most older Victorian would have of at least heard about.
In fact, the Spirit’s Parlor Car (above - note the American spelling of Parlor) entered service in November 1937 and gave those a sense on the Easter Saturday train of what train from decades ago would have been like.
The train left Shepparton at 10:16am and arrived in Tocumwal after a leisurely and trouble free journey about 90 minutes later.
Two diesel powered locomotives pulled the train – both 875hp units that entered service in 1962 and 1965.
Heritage train services, such as that in Easter Saturday, are restricted to 80km and are allowed to delay scheduled V/Line Services.
More details about the centre’s other services are listed at the Seymour Railway Heritage Centre website.