Inland Rail Project terminated

[old man emu]

The Federal Government has just announced that work on the inland rail route between Melbourne and Brisbane will cease when the track reaches Parkes in Central NSW. The given reason is that to complete the trtack from Parkes to Brisbane would cost $46 billion dollars. The purpose of the route was to reduce reliance on road transport between Queensland and Victoria along the Newell Highway which is the inland route.

 

Already millions have been spent on preliminary geophysical investigations along the proposed route north of Parkes. Rural properties have been purchased. The Gilgandra Shire created a residential estate will all the road and water infrastructure for the building of housing to rent to the construction workers employed on the nearby section. Once the work was completed those houses would be placed on the public market for sale. However, demand for housing follows demand for employment, and there is not much locally.

 

There was nothing wrong with the concept of a dedicated freight line between these two States. The problem, no doubt, is that the ability to generate the funding for the project, amongst all the other demands on government, is beyond the capacity of a Nation with such a small population compared to its area. Perhaps if our natural resources had not been sold off at bargain basement prices, or tax concessions to foreign companies were curtailed, the Government might be able to provide the funds to finance the many demands made of it.

 

Here's a link to the Inland Rail website: https://inlandrail.com.au/

[nomadpete]

sad.

We need the infrastructure.

 

 

[facthunter]

Barnaby will be disappointed. He Purchased Land . Railways have a record of not Paying for themselves In this country. Levels of utilisation would need to be far above what it is.   There's a lot of Maintenance on Railway Lines. and rolling stock. Nev

[Siso]

Maybe we should put some of the global warming budget into it. Trains are efficient when you work out the tonnes of freight/ litre of fuel.

[old man emu]

25 minutes ago, Siso said:

Trains are efficient when you work out the tonnes of freight/ litre of fuel.

That may be correct, but building the infrastructure to run them on is where the cost is. Also, railways need a higher level of maintenance than roads. Trains don't like potholes and other sorts of irregularities that trucks can accept from the roads they travel over.

[facthunter]

Rail tracks and  rolling stock have to be safe OR nothing gets there. The SHOW goes off the rails. Nev

[nomadpete]

21 hours ago, facthunter said:

There's a lot of Maintenance on Railway Lines. and rolling stock. Nev

Yeah, unlike like highway maintenance -  that's an investment!

 

[nomadpete]

1 hour ago, old man emu said:

That may be correct, but building the infrastructure to run them on is where the cost is.

As would apply if any government was so wasteful as to build a brand new straight, high speed expressway between capital cities.... from scratch.

 

Any greenfield project can be expected to cost a lot to do the groundwork.

[facthunter]

One BIG truck does more damage than hundreds of Lighter vehicles. Nev

[old man emu]

Short road trains are very commonly seen running up and down the Newell. I suppose that with a train of two trailers at least the rod is spared the weight of one prime mover.

[facthunter]

 You are assuming the Weight is Mostly the Prime Mover. Braking  causes the Most severe road surface damage Plus tree roots and flood water saturation of the soil under the road.. We move stuff over long distances Here so have to bear the  extra costs (of everything) when we live in remot(er) areas... Nev  

[old man emu]

No. I am not assuming the weight is mostly the prime mover. All I meant was that a road train of a prime mover and two trailers has one less prime mover than if each of the two trailers was pulled by a prime mover. In other words, a two trailer combination halves the amount of weight of two prime movers. These are the legal axle weights:

[facthunter]

You still need a minimum HP to weight ratio for the whole caboodle and long roadtrains sway and are best on straight, flat roads. You get More Payload per driver. Where do you park the thing? .

[willedoo]

ome, by short roadtrain, I'm assuming you're referring to B-doubles.

[onetrack]

Roadtrains don't sway if they're properly configured with long drawbars. Short drawbars create trailer sway, and short drawbars came about due to roadtrain length restrictions.

 

Spring suspensions are the hardest on road pavement, air-ride suspensions have been proven to be kinder to road pavements and bridges - to the point where you can get higher axle loadings in trucks and trailers with air-ride suspensions, as compared to spring suspensions.

[willedoo]

The most prone to swaying is the middle trailer on a conventional triple. They can get a sway up with the front and rear trailers fighting against it, not unlike a dutch roll in an aircraft.

[willedoo]

Given the right (or wrong) conditions, that is.

[onetrack]

I've seen the rear bogie on the last trailer of a badly-set-up triple roadtrain, sway as much as 1.5 - 2 metres out to each side. The bogie was actually tearing up the gravel road surface with the amount of sway it was doing. Top-heavy trailers will also indulge in sway, especially if the suspension is in poor shape. 

 

However, the most interesting story I got was from a truckie neighbour next to my workshop, who told me how he did in a wheelbearing on the centre axle of a tri-axle trailer one night, on the Nullarbor.

He decided to remove the offending hub, chain up the end of the axle, and to keep proceeding, until he could make it to a biggish town where proper repair facilities were - such as Kalgoorlie.

 

But he said he was staggered at the trailer performance with a missing set of wheels on one side of the triaxle set. He told me, "the trailer was all over the road" - he couldn't make it go in a straight line, no matter how hard he tried!

But he had little choice to keep going, at a much reduced speed, until he could reach Kalgoorlie. He said it was a real eye-opening exercise.

[onetrack]

I should've added to the story above, that the trailer was a van body trailer, not a flat-top, so it was already somewhat top-heavy, which would've aggravated the loss of the set of duals.

[willedoo]

I've seen that chain trick done before, real desperation. Also ran into a bloke who'd had that many flats he'd run out of spares and was running on mostly single wheels after taking off the blown tyres and bolting the bare rims back on. The biggest cause of flats on dirt roads is running over bolts that have shaken out of trailers on the corrugated roads. The wheel runs over them, flips them up and they puncture the tyre. You need good eyesight to spot them.

[willedoo]

3 minutes ago, onetrack said:

a van body trailer

A pantech.

[willedoo]

I think that inland rail project was originally heading to Toowoomba. They talked about plans to have a big transport hub at Wellcamp,just west of Toowoomba with the Wellcamp airport, the Toowoomba Range road bypass and the inland rail all meeting up there.

[nomadpete]

9 hours ago, willedoo said:

I think that inland rail project was originally heading to Toowoomba. They talked about plans to have a big transport hub at Wellcamp,just west of Toowoomba with the Wellcamp airport, the Toowoomba Range road bypass and the inland rail all meeting up there.

Yes. Inland Rail was planned through to Brisbane after going through my mother-in-law's place at Gowrie Junction (near Wellcamp). The Range tunnel was to start at Gowrie. That last bit would have been a big slice of budget.

 

I still think it would have been a good investment.

[onetrack]

The project won't be canned for good. This stoppage is just a reset to get all the unnecessary hangers-on, off the gravy train, so the project can get back to realistic costs.

I've seen so many of these major projects just become an open cheque book for opportunistic businesses, charging anything they like, simply because lazy, inefficient management, just wants to see progress.

Once the shock of the gravy train ceasing to exist comes home with a thump, the companies and contractors then become a lot more realistic and competitlve.

[facthunter]

The Adelaide to Darwin thing has never Made Money and I'd question the Indian Pacific also. Cheap Air travel kills it. A day in a train is one hour in a Plane. Nev