East Coast High Speed Rail

General Transport Discussion not specific to one state
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eddy
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

Tonymercury wrote:back in China again -

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017 ... 803809.htm


Enjoy the Chinglish!
Thanks for that

I sent them this email in case one of their readers has buckets of money they want to invest.

Hi

Thought you may be interested in Magtube which would connect Melbourne to Sydney via Albury and Canberra with three single 200km tunnels.

Northbound trains would wait at stations for 15 minutes while southbound are in tunnels and vice versa.

Using NWRL tunnel cost it would be AU$30b for the tunnels and I estimate AU$5b for the maglev track.

2,000 seat trains would leave Sydney 6.00, 6.30, 7.00, 7.30 etc. 
                                           Melbourne 6.15, 6.45, 7.15, 7.45 etc.
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

50 year old technology is great for only 100 km but if you want to beat air travel over 1,000 km you need to be doing 1,000 kph :D
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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As the prime minister of Japan has just called an election and in my opinion CLARA is uneconomical due to our immigration policy I thought I would send him this copy of the Magtube proposal I have just sent to Infrastructure Australia in the hope he would be desperate enough to give Australia a ten year interest free $35b loan.

Project proposal outline

Magtube would connect Melbourne to Sydney via Albury and Canberra with three single 200km tunnels.
Northbound trains would wait at stations for 15 minutes while southbound are in tunnels and vice versa.
Using NWRL tunnel cost it would be AU$30b for the tunnels and I estimate AU$5b for the maglev track.
2,000 seat trains would leave Sydney 6.00, 6.30, 7.00, 7.30 etc. 
                                           Melbourne 6.15, 6.45, 7.15, 7.45 etc.

Detailed project proposal

To avoid conflict and keep all the cities fifteen minutes apart I suggest that each city decides where to put their single Magtube station with Victoria, Act and NSW each contributing $500m per year over the ten years it takes to build it matched by the federal government.
As the 5.6m wide 2,000 seat trains will travel up to 1,000 kph the tunnels would need to be straight and deep between stations in hard rock which is the easiest to tunnel through.
To achieve this speed it must be a near vacuum with only one tonne of air entering the tunnel every time a train leaves a station which would be pushed out the other end via an exhaust valve that consists simply of a vertical 1m diameter pipe with a hinged lid.

Business case development and assessment

To make it economically viable the federal government would need a ten year interest free loan while it is built which I believe could be obtained from China or South Korea as they both want to develop a I,000 kph train or even Japan as it is desperate to sell their maglev technology which will be even better in ten years
Becoming a monopoly and lasting over 100 years when finished it would pay for itself many times over while growing Albury and Canberra to over five million each with much opportunity for value capture.
Other spin offs in my opinion are it would take pressure off Sydney and Melbourne, delay a second airport at Sydney, if 100 person carriages are used people can just hop on like a bus, much more secure than any surface rail, not limited by g force or air resistance, very cheap to run as maglev has no wheels and I may be going a bit far but defence could be in either city very quickly.
I believe the majority of voters would love it especially those who are unemployed in the country.

If you have any questions please email me.
mistereddb@gmail.com
Regards Eddy Barnett
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

This is the email I sent to Infrastructure Australia this morning.

Hi

I would like to point out a mistake I had made with my Magtube proposal and now the exhaust valve would be replaced with an electrically driven jet compressor to pull the 1 torr air in the same direction as the train to avoid any supersonic train bypass or pressure on the front.

Regards Eddy
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

French TGV losing $3b per year
Japanese big maglev tunnels only 5m per day
Hyperloop insufficient capacity
Magtube is the answer
Maybe the greens would make it their platform?
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

Finished my rough Sketchup Free face TBM https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/search ... face%20TBM
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

Post by eddy »

If labour costs are 40% of the tunnel cost then how about training kids who are interested in the next generation of hard rock TBM that will drive 10 metres per hour and be a job of the future instead of keeping them at school learning stuff that that there will be no jobs for even now.

It would cost no more than keeping them at school and with tunnel costs dramatically reduced train tunnels will be everywhere because just like steam trains were replaced with diesels conventional hard rock TBM will be replaced with the next generation that will drive ten times as fast.
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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Magtube is the only one that would be economically viable from the day it is finished as it is the only one that would go all the way killing the Sydney/Melbourne route by plane with income over $1b per year at least for the next 100 years.
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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I am worried that Paul will invest in CLARA building a couple of suburbs around Sydney and Melbourne with superannuation money rather than connecting Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra and Albury allowing them to grow big enough to have their own international flights and removing the need to build a second airport in Sydney.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/property ... v2s3u.html
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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Sent off a letter to Barnaby Joyce asking him to reconsider Magtube now he is infrastructure minister.

Being the only proposal that is economically viable the Greens, Nationals and Labor would love it.
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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It looks like the contractors have doubled their price which would make the Magtube $65b and even though running costs would still only be $50 million per year it sure would knock the economic viability around unless sometime in the next 100 years the price of jet fuel goes up.

http://www.johnholland.com.au/who-we-ar ... ling-work/
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Re: [SMH] Albanese concerned about high-speed rail

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This is the email I sent to the Gatesby research centre today. https://www.totalsimulation.co.uk/compu ... by-tunnel/

Hi
I thought you may be interested in my Magtube proposal.

The Magtube proposal is three single 6m diameter tunnels connecting Melbourne to Sydney with passing stations at Albury and Canberra where northbound trains would wait for 15 minutes while southbound trains are in these tunnels and vice versa.

Each time the 5.6m wide 2,000 seat train enters the tunnel via the double doors it would allow one tonne of air to enter which would then pushed by the 1,000 kph maglev train towards an electrically driven jet compressor at the other end which would then evacuate it.

Because of the reduced air pressure it would only have the same air resistance as a conventional metro therefore only using the same 137 GWh https://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov. ... gy-project add this to the 1gwh to drive the jet compressors and 200 staff and you have a running cost of $50m with a gaurenteed $2b per year income when it kills the air traffic between Sydney and Melbourne while saving 100,000 tonnes of jet fuel per year.

Using NWRL tunnel costs it would be $30b for the three single tunnels which would last 100 years and $5b for the maglev track.
https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/newsro ... north-west

Richard Branson is very interested in maglev trains in reduced pressure tunnels and may support installing a jet compressor and double doors to experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6l550vZcw4&t=35s
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High-speed rail vs air

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With implications for Australia.

Roderick.

High speed trains are now taking on plane travel in Asia and Europe . Jan 15 2018 .
High speed train travel in China: In 2015, 910 million Chinese travelled by all forms of rail-more than twice the 415.4 million who flew. Photo: AP CRH (China Railway High-speed) bullet trains at a maintenance station in Xi'an. Photo: AP Unsurprisingly, the future of train technology resides in China. The first magnetic-levitation, or maglev train, which can travel as fast as 430 km/h, operates in Shanghai; engineers a... Read more A Chinese mechanician checks a CRH (China Railway High-speed) bullet train. Photo: AP Passengers sit in a bullet train on the Shijiazhuang-Jinan high-speed railway at the Shijiazhuang Railway Station in Shijiazhuang city, north China's Hebei province. The Shijiazhuang-J... Read more A driver in a bullet train about to leave the Shijiazhuang Railway Station. Photo: AP A passenger enters a bullet trains at the Shijiazhuang Railway Station. Photo: AP A bullet train on the Shijiazhuang-Jinan high-speed railway at the Shijiazhuang Railway Station in Shijiazhuang city, north China's Hebei province. A 323 km high-speed railway with a d... Read more An attendant stands beside a CRH (China Railway High-speed) bullet train on the Xi'an Chengdu high-speed railway. Photo: AP Bullet train attendants pose on the Shijiazhuang-Jinan high-speed railway. Photo: AP Chinese girls of ethic minority groups dressed in traditional silver-decorated clothes and headwears celebrate as a "Fuxing" high speed bullet train on Shanghai-Kunming high speed rail... Read more Chinese girls of ethic minority groups dressed in traditional silver-decorated clothes and headwear celebrate as a "Fuxing" high speed bullet train on Shanghai-Kunming high speed railw... Read more A "Fuxing" high speed bullet train on the Beijing-Shanghai high speed railway line in Nanjing city, east China's Jiangsu province. High-speed railway is expected to cover 80% of major ... Read more Across Asia and Europe, high-speed rail is providing a competitive alternative to air travel on the same routes, in terms of price and the all-important barometer of time. Put that together with the environmental benefits that flow from not burning jet fuel, and staying on the ground begins to make more sense for travellers who would otherwise trudge to the airport.
Speedy trains and planes are generally competitive until your travel plans extend beyond 1000 kilometers, at which point travellers consider flying superior for time savings, according to an overview of academic research by the Journal of Advanced Transportation. But new technologies may push that boundary in the years and decades to come.
"Travel time is critical for the competitiveness of different transport modes," researchers from Beijing's Beihang University and the University of South Florida in Tampa wrote last year, buttressing a 2014 European study that found more air service on routes for which trains take longer. While this supports the theory that trains can supplant air travel if door-to-door time and price are equal or better, that doesn't turn out to be the case in reality. It's not a zero-sum game after all.
Eurostar's new E320 trains are fast connecting Europe Eurostar's new fleet of high-tech E320 trains are not only some of the fastest in the world but are revolutionising journeys around Europe. Anthony Dennis reports.
In general, the advent of fast, affordable train service in China, Japan, South Korea and western Europe has eroded such preconceptions as to how airlines and railroads compete. The entry of high-speed rail in markets dominated by airlines doesn't always lead to fewer available flights-there's evidence that, in many places, affordably priced train tickets actually spur new travel demand, much the way ultra-low-cost airlines in Asia, Europe and the Americas have affected bargain fares. That helps both trains and planes.
The new rail industry is seeing its most vibrant growth in China, which also has the world's largest high-speed network, the fastest trains and the greatest ambitions for future expansion. One of the world's busiest routes, Beijing to Shanghai, features the new domestically built Fuxing high-speed train, now with a top allowed speed of 351 kilometers per hour. That speed increase cut the 1247 kilometer trip to 4 hours, 28 minutes on a route that has about 100 million rail passengers annually, according to Chinese news service Xinhua.
Japan's high-speed shinkansen, or bullet trains, date to the 1960s and have become a staple of domestic travel, with speeds of about 320 km/h, making for a 2 1/2 hour trip between Tokyo and Osaka, one of the most heavily trafficked routes. That same city pairing, however, has hourly airline service by both of Japan's largest carriers-with each using a mix of wide-body Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s for the 70-minute flight. While adding station/airport dwell time and the time spent getting from city center to the platform/gate doesn't change the result in this case, such calculations sometimes make the difference when it comes to travel time.
In 2015, 910 million Chinese travelled by all forms of rail-more than twice the 415.4 million who flew, according to the journal article. Unsurprisingly, the future of train technology resides in China. The first magnetic-levitation, or maglev train, which can travel as fast as 430 km/h, operates in Shanghai; engineers are researching future maglev trains that could travel at a stunning 600 kph, an achievement that could thoroughly upend the current dynamic between air and ground travel.
Over time, Chinese airlines and high-speed trains have generally evolved so that fares and service classes are comparable, said Yu Zhang, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Florida and one of the journal report's authors. In their early days, Chinese high-speed rail operators sought to emulate airlines in terms of attendant training, with fares that were generally too high to spur much demand, she said. Since then, train fares have dropped.
"Air service is impacted, but we do not see a significant reduction of passengers, either," Yu said of the Chinese market. "It's really dependent on the particular route."
In Europe, the Eurostar high-speed rail from London to Paris and Brussels served 10 million riders last year, the fourth since it first topped that mark. The service began in November 1994 and drew 2.9 million passengers the following year. Current Eurostar fares begin at 29 pounds ($50), down from initial fares of 79 pounds in the system's early days.
Again, the different modes of transport that might seem to be rivals for the same passengers are in many way complementary. Low-cost airlines focused on short-haul routes and European high-speed rail options that would seem to compete are generally not rivals, given their vast differences on other counts. The trains generally serve city centers, while the air carriers tend to use secondary airports further afield as a way to lower their costs.
On the Paris-Bordeaux line, high speed rail is "by far the most competitive travel offer with a real traffic growth of 70 per cent since its launch in July," the French railway SNCF said in an emailed statement. "In November, we reached 82 per cent of the Paris-Bordeaux travel market share," SNCF official Rachel Picard said. "This high speed benefits all customers, including professional travellers whose number has doubled compared to 2016."
A "Fuxing" high speed bullet train on the Beijing-Shanghai railway line. Photo: Chen ke See also: 10 things you need to know about train travel in Europe And what happened to the big airlines on the continent such as Air France-KLM? They have ceded traffic on the shorter routes to low-cost rivals, including Ryanair and EasyJet. Many major U.S. airlines are following suit, abandoning smaller regional jets and reducing service to less-populated cities.
"The way airlines think of trips that are short-haul has changed," said Holly Reed, an executive with Texas Central Partners, which is raising money to build a bullet train between Dallas and Houston.
By now, you may have noticed the absence of one large country from this discussion. After a century of neglect, U.S. transit infrastructure has more in common with the developing world than with China or Western Europe. While Asia rail systems measure their passengers in the hundreds of millions, in the U.S., Amtrak had 31.3 million riders in its 2016 fiscal year.
America's fastest train, the Acela, travels on the Boston-New York-Washington corridor with a speed capability of only 241 km/h - but the trains rarely exceed 161 km/h due to congestion - and then only for short periods on aging tracks. With the rails often running parallel with the busy Interstate 95, it's not uncommon to see cars outpacing locomotives.
See also: 400 km/h - on board the world's fastest train See also: On board The Ghan, the epic train journey through Australia's heart See also: 50 years of bullet trains in Japan.
http://www.traveller.com.au/high-speed- ... ope-h0gl70
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Re: High-speed rail vs air

Post by eddy »

One big reason a train would be a monopoly on some routes is because when maglev is used in pressure reduced tunnels planes cannot compete with such low running costs and reliability.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by flaneur »

eventually Australia will join the rest of the world and introduce HSR, along with politicians who have a sense of reality. There is no economic sense in having short haul flights. The new Sydney Airport is an example of last century thinking, requires the loss of farmland and eventually as populations grow new housing. Adelaide - Melbourne, Melbourne - Canberra - Sydney, Sydney - Brisbane are immediate contenders for HSR. Trains don't stop because of fog or bad weather, they will however require their own per way as they can't be affected by local passenger and freight rail services. Only those who have travelled on HSR overseas will know the benefits and enjoyment of fast rail
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

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flaneur wrote:eventually Australia will join the rest of the world and introduce HSR, along with politicians who have a sense of reality. There is no economic sense in having short haul flights. The new Sydney Airport is an example of last century thinking, requires the loss of farmland and eventually as populations grow new housing. Adelaide - Melbourne, Melbourne - Canberra - Sydney, Sydney - Brisbane are immediate contenders for HSR. Trains don't stop because of fog or bad weather, they will however require their own per way as they can't be affected by local passenger and freight rail services. Only those who have travelled on HSR overseas will know the benefits and enjoyment of fast rail
The Japanese Maglev will be 86% tunnels https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/ ... mFu1KiWbIU

America has a lot of opposition to surface HSR from farmers who do not want it cutting through their farms https://www.uofcbusinessjournal.com/sin ... nder-Trump

Rather than big horse shoe shaped tunnels with tiny trains like the Japanese maglev the new TBM can penetrate where only old drill and blast could before to allow big trains in small tunnels with low pressure technology to be used. https://www.tunneltalk.com/Norway-18Jan ... proach.php

In my opinion buying up lots of land would be a waste of money for fast passenger trains.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by Merc1107 »

Thanks for linking the article. I think it raises some valid points; specifically pointing to high-speed technology as being too advanced and too costly at this point in time.

The challenge in a place like Western Australia will be improving the existing rail links to nearby regional centres like Toodyay, Northam, Kalgoorlie, Bunbury and intermediate stops to make services more viable for commuters (and leisure/tourist trips). Ensuring connections are maintained with road-coaches serving smaller areas would also be important.

Bunbury & the southwest seem to warrant several road-coaches from Perth each day, so surely a fast, reliable rail link is warranted (and would help spur further growth in the region, to take pressure off the Perth Metro area). Then there's Albany. The alignment used in the '60s and '70s was (and still is) considerably slower than road-coach. My understanding is alternate routings have long since been removed altogether :?
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

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Australians have voted with their feet to live near international sized cities and so I suggest growing Albury and Canberra is the way to go rather than wasting money on limited speed track.

Three single tunnels between Melbourne, Albury, Canberra and Sydney would cost $30b at NWRL costs with $2b per year income and only $50m per year running cost.

It would take 10 years to do with Vic, ACT and NSW contributing $500m per year matched by the fed.

How good for all these cities to be just 15 minutes apart.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

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I think we need to consider which modes serve which purposes efficiently. People get hung up on rail serving fast direct routes between state capitals, but the reality is that it may be better to use rail to link significant regional towns to a major city at each end. The purpose of the Sydney - Melbourne XPT is not really to serve traffic flows from Melbourne to Sydney - it is cheaper and much quicker to fly! It's real purpose is to link towns in regional NSW, and to a lesser degree Victoria, to Sydney and Melbourne. I would see the primary purpose of speeding up rail links between Melbourne / Adelaide / Sydney / Brisbane as making it quicker and hence more efficient to transport for the same purpose - to make it possible to go between Canberra and Sydney and back in a day, or Wagga Wagga and Melbourne and back in a day. Not Melbourne to Sydney in 4 hours - it is still more efficient to fly. Hence medium speed rail may well be a better approach - it is much cheaper, hence more achievable for nearly as much benefit. In many cases it may well be possible to upgrade existing track reasonably simply for medium speed rail - an early version of the Victorian RFR scheme was to consider and allow for 200 km/h operation. The requirement for no level crossings on track with higher speeds than 160 km/h kept the maximum speed to 160 km/h but it may be a relatively cheap upgrade to ditch the crossings if the alignment met the higher standard originally investigated, especially if compared to new alignment at higher speeds.

Indeed a 220km/h track between Melbourne / Bendigo / Swan Hill / Mildura / Berri / Murray Bridge / Adelaide may well be more efficient than the traditional direct route despite taking longer as it will serve a number of significant rural towns, many currently underserved.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by eddy »

krustyklo wrote:I think we need to consider which modes serve which purposes efficiently. People get hung up on rail serving fast direct routes between state capitals, but the reality is that it may be better to use rail to link significant regional towns to a major city at each end. The purpose of the Sydney - Melbourne XPT is not really to serve traffic flows from Melbourne to Sydney - it is cheaper and much quicker to fly! It's real purpose is to link towns in regional NSW, and to a lesser degree Victoria, to Sydney and Melbourne. I would see the primary purpose of speeding up rail links between Melbourne / Adelaide / Sydney / Brisbane as making it quicker and hence more efficient to transport for the same purpose - to make it possible to go between Canberra and Sydney and back in a day, or Wagga Wagga and Melbourne and back in a day. Not Melbourne to Sydney in 4 hours - it is still more efficient to fly. Hence medium speed rail may well be a better approach - it is much cheaper, hence more achievable for nearly as much benefit. In many cases it may well be possible to upgrade existing track reasonably simply for medium speed rail - an early version of the Victorian RFR scheme was to consider and allow for 200 km/h operation. The requirement for no level crossings on track with higher speeds than 160 km/h kept the maximum speed to 160 km/h but it may be a relatively cheap upgrade to ditch the crossings if the alignment met the higher standard originally investigated, especially if compared to new alignment at higher speeds.

Indeed a 220km/h track between Melbourne / Bendigo / Swan Hill / Mildura / Berri / Murray Bridge / Adelaide may well be more efficient than the traditional direct route despite taking longer as it will serve a number of significant rural towns, many currently underserved.
There is no way passenger trains can go faster than 160kph without building completely new lines in most places so I believe there would be a better business case to connect Sydney, Canberra, Albury and Melbourne killing air transport on that route and immediately having $2b per year income.

Most people want to live within driving distance of an international city so why not grow Albury and Canberra especially as many Sydney people think it is full and want to reduce immigration.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by krustyklo »

There is no way passenger trains can go faster than 160kph without building completely new lines in most places
Yeah? "No way"? Interestingly the study I read at the time on the RFR project suggested the key impediment was the need to grade seperate any line operating over 160 km/h, not that the line alignments were unable to take the speed. It would be interesting to know if the RFR project allowed passively for faster operation if the funds ever came available for the grade seperations, and what speeds the lines are capable of. I should see if I saved a copy, or if anything official is still online.

Looking elsewhere, I would have thought the current Perth - Adelaide line alignment would be perfectly fine for high speed trains. Doesn't that stretch of track have the longest stretch of straight line in the world?
It includes a 478 kilometres (297 mi) stretch of dead-straight track, the world's longest, between the 797 km (495 mi) post west of Ooldea and the 1,275 km (792 mi) post west of Loongana. The line forms an important freight route between Western Australia and the eastern states.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Australian_Railway.

Have you also considered tilt trains? The Queensland Tilt Train does 160 km/h on narrow gauge. Was the Swedish tilt train trialled in NSW allowed higher speeds than XPTs despite the tilt being disabled? Most of the issues with curved track is less that the train will fall off and moreso passenger discomfort. Varying online references suggest somewhere between 20 and 40% higher speeds are achievable.

This Parliamentary Library overview is quite interesting in tilt train considerations in Australia: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament ... 798/98bp16 notably of relevance
A X2000 tilt train, manufactured by Asea Brown Boveri in Sweden is trialed by the NSW State Rail Authority in country areas. The train tilts into corners, which allows it to take corners faster than conventional trains. It is hoped that the tilt train would reduce the rail travel time between Canberra and Sydney from 4 hours and 10 minutes to about 2 hours on the existing track. The trial is reported to be less than fully successful because the deficiencies of the existing track.
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by eddy »

If they want to grade separate every farmers access to every paddock I think it would cost a lot more than what they think but they may be right across a desert or something.

I read they are not making any more tilt trains as there is insufficient demand with people building straight tracks for HSR
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Re: High Speed Rail - Air travel

Post by Tonymercury »

eddy wrote:
I read they are not making any more tilt trains as there is insufficient demand with people building straight tracks for HSR
Source please.
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