The Perrottet government has quietly abandoned its vision to build its own dedicated fast rail line between Sydney and Newcastle despite four years and roughly $100m spent on feasibility studies, abruptly halting work on a final business case just as geotechnical drilling was being planned.
Confidential documents seen by Guardian Australia reveal that the New South Wales transport department now considers further planning and construction of a dedicated fast rail line to Newcastle to be a task for the commonwealth and its yet-to-be-operational high speed rail authority (HSRA) – which will itself restart feasibility studies when it is formed.
The decision to dramatically scale back its fast rail agenda comes as the NSW government prepares to go deeper into debt to pay for the state’s ballooning infrastructure build.
Initially announced by the former premier Gladys Berejiklian as a showpiece policy in the lead-up to the 2019 state election, NSW’s fast rail strategy had focused on four corridors from Sydney – to Newcastle, Wollongong, Canberra and Orange – options that were identified in a government-commissioned review into potential routes undertaken by the British rail expert Prof Andrew McNaughton.
“I’m not going to wait for the other states and the federal government, we’ve waited too long so NSW will start the process,” Berejiklian said when announcing the strategy.
While the McNaughton report has been kept secret by the NSW government, with Guardian Australia spending two years attempting to obtain the strategy under freedom of information laws, it is understood that early-stage pre-feasibility cases for all four corridors were conducted, with the Newcastle option emerging as a priority.
In the years since, the department had been progressing a final business case for the construction of a new, dedicated track for a train capable of travelling up to 250km/h from a station at Sydney’s Olympic Park to Newcastle, achieving the trip in one hour, compared with the more than two and a half hours that express services now take.
In addition to new rolling stock and track, the faster travel time was to be achieved by limiting the service to a handful of stops including Epping, Tuggerah, Gosford and Lake Macquarie.
Construction of the corridor was set to require about 50km of tunnelling, including an individual section as long as 30km to the Hawkesbury River as well as what would have been Australia’s longest rail bridge, as part of a megaproject that would have gradually opened from the second half of next decade.
Geotechnical testing plans were under way, with the first step to conduct rock drilling at the site where tunnelling would be required to reach the Hawkesbury River.
But the Guardian can reveal that in mid-December, fast rail project teams that had been developing the final business case for the Newcastle corridor were told that building a new dedicated track was no longer a consideration of the state government.
At the time the project was shelved, there were scores of people on teams – either as department employees or external consultants – devoted to it. They have since been redeployed to smaller projects to add additional tracks to short sections of the existing suburban train network.
The NSW government had spent $87m on planning for its fast rail strategy since 2019, budget papers show, and had allocated a further $95m to spend this financial year, with project teams’ operations running as planned up until the abrupt change of direction in December.
Instead, the state government’s plans to improve rail services to Newcastle now constitute track quadruplication at three sections of the existing railway – between Tuggerah-Wyong, Hornsby-Berowra and Epping-Hornsby – measures which are expected to allow express services that run between Newcastle and Sydney to run more frequently, as opposed to any speed improvements.
The Perrottet government’s rail strategy now stands in contrast to McNaughton’s position, who told the Sydney Morning Herald in December that it was not possible to simply upgrade the existing track. “It’s a lovely piece of Victorian [era] engineering, but it’s basically useless,” he said.
A Transport for NSW spokesperson insisted that “work has not ceased on plans to deliver a fast rail network in NSW” but, when asked if the department was now developing final business cases for dedicated fast rail track on any corridors as part of its strategy, the spokesperson did not identify any.
Instead, the spokesperson said the department “is progressing business cases for in-corridor faster rail improvements to existing lines while planning progresses with the Australian government for a national high speed rail network”.
Guardian Australia understands the NSW government has not secured any land on any of the fast rail corridors identified by McNaughton.
The spokesperson said “late last year” the NSW infrastructure minister, Rob Stokes, wrote to his federal counterpart, Catherine King, asking for the future HSRA to work with the state transport department and the Greater Cities Commission (formerly the Greater Sydney Commission) “to ensure plans for high speed and fast rail are well coordinated between the commonwealth and NSW governments”.
A Greater Cities Commission spokesperson did not identify any progress it had made regarding fast rail collaboration with the commonwealth, and noted the HSRA did not yet exist.
On Wednesday King addressed the National Press Club, saying the first thing the HSRA would be tasked with “will be to redo the business case for high speed rail”, beginning with Sydney to Newcastle. She noted that the NSW government had “got money already on the table” for fast rail in the area, raising the idea of “whether we combine those projects”.
The revelations about fast rail between Sydney and Newcastle follow the release of a proposal last week arguing that the Albanese government should pursue its high-speed rail ambition by progressively upgrading sections of the existing train corridor, starting between Sydney and Canberra as the cheapest and quickest way to deliver fast trains by the end of this decade, as opposed to the more challenging Newcastle corridor.
