The Case for The Overland
The argument for fast rail between Adelaide and Melbourne is surprisingly strong, having a higher benefit-cost ratio than the much more expensive east coast proposals.
Tag: cost
Elon’s Tunnel
When one engineer accuses another of having his sums wrong by a factor of 50, you can be sure that one of them has said something silly.
The government’s Faster Rail Prospectus
The Turnbull government has today issued a call for faster rail proposals – the prospectus is practical, serious and foreshadows some form of government assistance. Hot rails is optimistic that this will elicit some interesting concepts from the private sector.
A new Sydney-Canberra high-speed railway
Sydney Central to Canberra Civic in 91 minutes, for less than $5 billion: A new strategy for high-speed rail in Australia which will have it built sooner, cheaper and at no net cost to the taxpayer.
Metro Sydney
A 10km dual-track tunnel takes us to Central Station at 200-plus km/h – this is the most expensive sector of the railway by far, but by using existing infrastructure to a far greater extent than previous proposals, the total cost to access the Sydney CBD is the lowest of any proposal to date.
Liverpool
In our look at the possible corridors we could use to access inner Sydney, we identified two possible contenders that could get us to within about 15km of Central Station before we had to go underground. The first was to use the East Hills corridor until Revesby or soon after, and subsequently using a long tunnel (15-17km) to Central. The other main option was to use the Cumberland and Inner West corridors via Liverpool and Cabramatta…
Glenfield
The existing rail corridor between Campbelltown and Glenfield was rejected by the 2013 government study due to having insufficiently large radius for their unrealistically fast 400km/h design speed. However, the corridor actually has fairly good geometry, with only two curves of relatively gentle radius; the one at Leumeah has radius 1000m, while the one between Minto and Ingleburn has radius 1800m. This is sufficient for tilting trains to achieve 200km/h…
Campbelltown
The last sector before we reach metropolitan Sydney presents few design difficulties, or at least no more so than the adjacent Hume Highway. A couple of bridges and moderately deep cuttings are all that is needed to bring the high-speed railway back to the Southwest Rail Corridor, where the prevailing radius is about 1800m.
Land acquisition
Although a major rationale for Hot Rails is re-use of the existing rail corridor, there are numerous places in which the existing corridor is not straight enough to enable high-speed use, no matter the degree of cant or tilt adopted. In these sections land will still have to be acquired….
Power
Although Hot Rails will not specify any power infrastructure, we will include some cost estimates of it here all the same. AECOM13 AECOM13’s estimates are detailed in the table below; the total cost of $5.2 billion comes to an average of $2.975m/km. [table] Element,Cost,Unit,Frequency Modify existing substation,$5m,Each,As needed New transmission…
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Elon’s Tunnel
When one engineer accuses another of having his sums wrong by a factor of 50, you can be sure that one of them has said something silly.
The government’s Faster Rail Prospectus
The Turnbull government has today issued a call for faster rail proposals – the prospectus is practical, serious and foreshadows some form of government assistance. Hot rails is optimistic that this will elicit some interesting concepts from the private sector.
A new Sydney-Canberra high-speed railway
Sydney Central to Canberra Civic in 91 minutes, for less than $5 billion: A new strategy for high-speed rail in Australia which will have it built sooner, cheaper and at no net cost to the taxpayer.
Metro Sydney
A 10km dual-track tunnel takes us to Central Station at 200-plus km/h – this is the most expensive sector of the railway by far, but by using existing infrastructure to a far greater extent than previous proposals, the total cost to access the Sydney CBD is the lowest of any proposal to date.
Liverpool
In our look at the possible corridors we could use to access inner Sydney, we identified two possible contenders that could get us to within about 15km of Central Station before we had to go underground. The first was to use the East Hills corridor until Revesby or soon after, and subsequently using a long tunnel (15-17km) to Central. The other main option was to use the Cumberland and Inner West corridors via Liverpool and Cabramatta…
Glenfield
The existing rail corridor between Campbelltown and Glenfield was rejected by the 2013 government study due to having insufficiently large radius for their unrealistically fast 400km/h design speed. However, the corridor actually has fairly good geometry, with only two curves of relatively gentle radius; the one at Leumeah has radius 1000m, while the one between Minto and Ingleburn has radius 1800m. This is sufficient for tilting trains to achieve 200km/h…
Campbelltown
The last sector before we reach metropolitan Sydney presents few design difficulties, or at least no more so than the adjacent Hume Highway. A couple of bridges and moderately deep cuttings are all that is needed to bring the high-speed railway back to the Southwest Rail Corridor, where the prevailing radius is about 1800m.
Land acquisition
Although a major rationale for Hot Rails is re-use of the existing rail corridor, there are numerous places in which the existing corridor is not straight enough to enable high-speed use, no matter the degree of cant or tilt adopted. In these sections land will still have to be acquired….
Power
Although Hot Rails will not specify any power infrastructure, we will include some cost estimates of it here all the same. AECOM13 AECOM13’s estimates are detailed in the table below; the total cost of $5.2 billion comes to an average of $2.975m/km. [table] Element,Cost,Unit,Frequency Modify existing substation,$5m,Each,As needed New transmission…