Dr Paul Wild was the head of the CSIRO in 1983 when he took the train from Canberra to Sydney. Despite being called the XPT (“express passenger train”), the trip was very slow, slower than express trains in England in the 1840s! Being in charge of Australia’s scientific and industrial brains trust, Paul Wild set out to develop a cutting-edge fast rail service between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, with eventual extensions to Brisbane and Adelaide. The proposal was made public in 1984, but the Hawke-Keating government—busy sacrificing the Australian dollar to international speculators and opening Australia up to foreign banks—rubbished the idea. Transport Minister Peter Morris insisted Dr Wild organise it as an entirely privately-funded project. Dr Wild wasn’t then seeking public funding for the project, just for a study, and he shot back: “In many areas Australia needed desperately to dig itself out of the stagnation of 19th-century thought.”
By 1985 Paul Wild had pulled together a joint venture involving Sir Peter Abeles’ TNT, Japanese construction firm Kumagai Gumi, and Elders IXL; BHP, then a steel company, joined in 1987. The VFT Pre-Feasibility Study completed in 1987 found that the project was technically feasible and financially viable. (This was at a time when, despite Australia’s low population density, the Sydney-Melbourne flight route was the fourth busiest in the world; today it is the second busiest in the world, and the populations of Sydney and Melbourne have more than doubled.)
Over the next few years the relevant federal and state governments examined the proposal. The original plan was for a coastal route through Cooma, Orbost and Gippsland to Melbourne, which included the potential of regional development. In 1990 this was compared with an inland route essentially down the Hume Highway, which the Joint Venture then announced as its preferred option, purely on cost. Dr Wild was disappointed that governments were not interested in the development benefits of the project for south-eastern Australia. In October 1990 an Access Economics study showed the project would have a net benefit to the nation of $9.9 billion, but the federal and state governments would not move on the tax treatment the project needed. After the Keating government gave the project a flat “no” in 1991, the joint venture ceased work on the project. In a bitter irony for Dr Wild and his colleagues, not long afterwards the Commonwealth government introduced infrastructure bonds, which would have solved the VFT Joint Venture’s financial issues.
Dr Wild was criticised for aiming for a speed of 360 km/h, or 100 metres per second, at a time when the fastest train in the world, France’s TGV, only reached 270 km/h, but now much greater speeds are commonplace—Australia could have been a world-leader in high-speed rail technology. While he was working on the VFT, Dr Wild also did some work on a proposal for a high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai. China went on to build a fast train from Beijing to Shanghai, which it completed in 2008, and has since built more than 35,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, using Australian iron ore, while Australia has not laid a single metre of track.
Australia needs a vision for economic development to revive the economy. "
YEP...great work by our Governments since then....great work....
Interesting also as a mate of mine was recently saying we should build a huge railway from
over here to over there.....
Naaah…….too hard......
