“A second airport for Sydney has to be connected to Sydney by both an expressway and a railway or perhaps some rapid transport system … a high-speed rail could be constructed,” the late Liberal MP for Mackellar, Bill Wentworth, said in 1971.
More than 50 years later, the federal government has announced construction of a bullet train line from Sydney to Newcastle will begin in two years.
The planned high-speed rail will “change the way people live, work and travel in our country’s most populous region”, the infrastructure minister, Catherine King, said on Tuesday.
Up to 16 million people a year could end up using it by 2041, while it will also contribute to the government’s net zero emissions by 2050 target.
Once it’s up and running, commuters will be able to travel between Newcastle and Sydney in an hour (for $31), instead of more than 2.5 hours, and from Gosford on the Central Coast to Sydney in 30 minutes, down from 90.
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King has pledged another $230m for detailed design work, taking the spend in the development phase to $659.6m.
The Sydney to Newcastle stage will cost $61.2bn overall, and the bill goes up to $93bn once the line goes all the way to the new Western Sydney international airport. The government is looking for private sector investor to pick up part of the tab.
The world’s first high-speed train, the Shinkansen, started operating in Japan in 1964, not long before Wentworth proposed a system for Australia. But despite multiple announcements since then, it has not yet happened.
“We’re a little bit unusual in that most countries that have thought about doing high-speed rail have actually gone ahead and built it,” University of Sydney senior lecturer in transport and logistics management, Dr Geoffrey Clifton, says.
“It’s one of those carrots that gets pulled out at election time … when governments actually get into power they do the numbers and find it’s not value for money.”
The plan is to link the cities with 140km of track for trains that can go up to 320km/h.
King said the spending announced on Tuesday was for very detailed design work.
“Like basically going metre by metre along the entire track and designing this thing to make sure we know every single cost, we actually understand the geotechnology and we get all of the planning approvals,” she told ABC Sydney.
“It is a costly and expensive project, but we’ve got to get it started.
“We don’t want to be one of the few populated countries in the world that does not have a high-speed rail network.
“What we’ve done before is … we’ve had vision, we’ve started to do the work, we’ve then lost office and not been able to continue that.”
There have been multiple iterations of the visions for high-speed trains, but so far they have all been derailed.
In 1984, the CSIRO took a proposal for a very fast train (VFT) from Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra to Bob Hawke’s federal government, as well as the state governments of NSW and Victoria.
In 1998 the then prime minister, John Howard, announced a proposed Canberra to Sydney route, but it proved too expensive.
In 2008 Anthony Albanese, then the infrastructure minister, talked up the merits of a VFT between Sydney and Canberra.
In 2011, the Gillard government announced a feasibility study for a high-speed rail line for the east coast.
In 2013, Kevin Rudd pledged $52m towards a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail line between Sydney and Melbourne, to be delivered by 2035.
That same year, Albanese, by that time transport minister, unveiled the details of a proposed $144bn Brisbane to Melbourne train.
“As a former infrastructure minister I can tell you, the only thing that moves fast in this process is the train,” he said this week.
When the Coalition won the next election, Tony Abbott canned that plan, before his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, announced $20m in the 2017 budget to develop business cases for high-speed rail.
The National Faster Rail Agency was established in 2019, then in 2023 it was replaced by the High Speed Rail Authority (HSRA), to oversee a network connecting Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and regional communities across the east coast, starting with Newcastle to Sydney.
Then there have been other projects proposed by state governments and private consortiums, other studies undertaken and inquiries held.
In a 2014 episode of the often prescient satire Utopia, Tony (Rob Sitch) tries in vain to dissuade Jim (Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann) from announcing a high-speed rail plan.
“People have been trying to get a very fast train up in this country for nearly 50 years … it hasn’t got up,” Tony says. “What does that tell you?”
“We lack vision,” Jim says.
“Or else it simply won’t work,” Tony says.
So will it happen this time?
The HSRA refers to the 2013 east coast high speed rail study, which found high-speed rail was technically feasible, would have a positive economic benefit and would have “a transformational effect on how most Australians live, work and travel”.
“Since then, Australia has seen population growth and changing settlement patterns on the east coast, new ways of working as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact of a changing climate,” it says on its website, adding that other rail infrastructure investment has seen the creation of a construction skills base.
King has now also released a business case which found the project will generate more than $250bn in economic activity, almost 100,000 jobs, and see up to 160,000 homes built in the Sydney-Newcastle corridor.
“I won’t be cutting any cakes until there’s actually shovels in the ground,” Clifton says.
“But it seems more likely than it has in the past, and if it does [go ahead] it will be very helpful alleviating pressure on housing and opening up job opportunities.”
He also warned that it needed to give value for money.
“We’ve seen megaprojects go well over the expected amount, so it’s highly likely we’ll see costs overrun,” he said.
Albanese said on Wednesday he accepted that he “will not be the prime minister when high-speed rail is finished”.
“But I am determined to be the prime minister who starts it.”
