Safety On The Line
Sun Herald
Sunday June 14, 1998
The tender for a Sydney-Canberra Very Fast Train will be selected next month. But a horrendous derailment in Germany and a crash at Concord West in Sydney have put the brakes on the hype. Alex Mitchell reports.
THE plan to build a high-speed rail link between Sydney and the nation's capital has been around for so long it's got whiskers. It has been blueprinted, argued, presented, postponed, shelved and reconsidered with almost monotonous regularity.
It was Prime Minister John Howard who hauled it out of the bottom drawer 18 months ago and instructed his then Transport Minister John Sharp to seek expressions of interest.
While seasoned bureaucrats were rendered speechless by the PM's daring move, big construction groups and financiers rubbed their hands with anticipation.
This was the first "big ticket" works program to emanate from the Federal Coalition and it drew excited interest from six consortiums, recently reduced to four (see graphic).
As joint stakeholders, the Federal, State and ACT governments have established a panel of experts to review the four tenders, with an announcement on the successful bidder expected on July 15.
The project has attracted a high degree of interest because it is Australia's first step into the bold new world of high-speed technology, where trains cruise at 200-500km/h. They've been doing it successfully in Western Europe and Japan for almost two decades but it is untried here.
But while rival tenderers were trying to impress Federal and State politicians about how fast their trains could go, a derailment occurred in the northern German town of Eschede on June 3, killing 94 passengers. In an instant, the safety record of high-speed train travel was shattered.
Britain's The Guardian newspaper commented: "The German inter-city disaster has much in common with the crash of an airliner: the method of travel is among the safest, but when something goes wrong, it is likely to have exceptionally horrific results. It also provokes - quite rightly - some very searching questions."
For the proposed Sydney- Canberra line, the questions brought into sharp focus were speed, safety, cost, the environment and, in all its simplicity, how many passengers would travel each day between Sydney (population three million) and Canberra (300,000) and how much would they be prepared to pay for a seat? In other words, is it viable?
Two tenderers - Capital Rail and Inter Capital Express - are offering tilt-train technology, which allows trains to travel much faster by tilting when they negotiate curves. Both tilt bids concentrate on dependability and affordability.
Capital Rail's proposal manager Peter Thornton, of Ove Arup & Partners, said: "By electrifying and upgrading the existing track at a cost of about $1 billion, and using tilt trains with suspension systems that allow them to corner faster, Capital Rail will deliver an initial journey time between Sydney Central and Canberra of around 110 minutes."
Capital's "Crusaris" train, based on technology developed in Sweden, Denmark and Germany, has a top speed of 250km/h and would offer 18 return services a day between 6am and 11pm.
INTER Capital Express, an offshoot of Germany's Siemens group, whose ICE train crashed at Eschede, is a diesel-electric train with a maximum speed of 200km/h. Its transit time between the two capitals is two hours, with six express services a day and 15 other daily services, stopping at Campbelltown, Bowral and Goulburn.
"Being diesel-electric it doesn't require electrified tracks, with its added land use and ugly wire system," said project lobbyist Stewart White. "The ICE consortium utilises the existing track but replaces and upgrades it while modernising the signalling to suit tilt requirements."
Another tenderer, the Speedrail Group, is pressing the case for France's Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV), launched in 1981, which is now in use in Spain, Belgium, Holland and England. The express run from Sydney to Canberra would take 81 minutes, with trains leaving every 45 minutes providing 24 services each way, each day.
The proposed TGV would follow the rail corridor from Sydney Central to Parramatta and Campbelltown but travel on a new high-speed line built close to the freeway to Canberra Airport.
The promoters explain that French very-fast trains travel at 300km/h and have a seamless safety record - three billion passengers carried around the world without a fatality. If selected, Speedrail plans to spend $3 billion and begin operations in 2003.
The fourth tenderer, the Transrapid consortium, is the one that has captured public imagination because it is offering the revolutionary magnetic levitation (MagLev) technology and breathtakingly fast journeys to Canberra: 59 minutes.
It has also won considerable support in western Sydney by announcing a separate line from Central to Homebush, Parramatta and Blacktown. Its Canberra route is via Wollongong, Moss Vale and Goulburn, and it is pushing a third subsidiary route to Newcastle.
MAGLEV uses the principles of magnetism - opposite poles attract, similar poles repel - and does away with wheels and rail tracks. Instead, electromagnetic energy lifts coaches from an elevated guideway and propels them forward. The motion is frictionless and almost noiseless because the coaches are travelling on a cushion of air.
It has a top speed of 550km/h, cruises at 400km/h and can accelerate to 300km/h in just 60 seconds. On the Sydney-Canberra journey it would be 20 minutes faster than Speedrail's TGV and half the time of the tilt train options.
If anything, the German crash has strengthened Transrapid's appeal. As project director Philip Sellars explained: "The Transrapid train wraps around the guideway. It is positioned, vertically and laterally, by powerful electromagnets, making it virtually impossible to derail. It travels along a dedicated guideway and does not share the track with slow-moving freight trains or passenger trains, thereby eliminating the possibility of collision."
Transrapid is handicapped by the fact that until the Hamburg-Berlin MagLev line is completed in 2005, the only working example is a 32km test track in Germany. Since opening in 1987, however, it has drawn around 12,000 people a month to experience the new era of train travel.
Janet Holmes a Court, chairman of the John Holland Group which heads the Transrapid consortium, declared recently: "This is a project of vision and substance for Australia."
It remains to be seen whether John Howard, NSW Premier Bob Carr and ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell share the dream.
VFT THE BIDDERS
* SPEEDRAIL GROUP (TGV)
* Leighton Contractors Pty Ltd
* GEC ALSTHOM
* Qantas
TRANSRAPID
(magnetic levitation)
* Thyssen Transrapid Systems
* Boral
* BHP
* Integral Energy
* Pacific Dunlop Cables
* John Holland Construction & Engineering Pty Ltd.
CAPITAL RAIL GROUP (electric tilt train)
* Asea Brown Boveri
* Arup/TMG International
* Adtranz
* SwedeRail
* Countrylink
* Ansett
* Bankers Trust
INTER CAPITAL EXPRESS (diesel tilt train)
* ADIC Australia Ltd/Babcock & Brown pty Ltd
* Baulderstone Hornibrook Pty Ltd
* Siemens Ltd
* GHD Transmark Pty Ltd
* Hastings Funds Management Ltd
* TNT Transit Systems Pty Ltd
* GB Railways Special Projects Pty Ltd
© 1998 Sun Herald