High Speed Rail (Australia)

Hello Kitty High Speed Train in Japan

After studying High Speed Rail in Australia for 40 years, Australia is finally doing it! Anthony Albanese has promised and is close to delivering, a 320kph service from Sydney to Newcastle.

Now, this is the hardest, most expensive part of the entire planned East Coast (Melbourne to Brisbane) network, but let's not let that get us down. I mean, it's not like the past work done in 2013 recommended Sydney to Melbourne first...

Lets look at the history first, and then well dive into the current plan.

History

The first real proposal for high-speed rail was from the CSIRO in 1984, to link Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, using French TGV trains. Estimated cost was $2.5bn at the time. The Government at the time declined.

Soon after a ‘Very Fast Train Joint Venture’, proposed the similar route, Sydney to Melbourne, and in 1991 Government declined.

Throughout the 90s, a few proposals were made, the government selected the Speedtrail project as their preferred bid, and then declined to do anything anyway. And again in early 2000s, a few more studies were done, but nothing concrete was put to government for consideration.

Kevin Rudd

Then, in 2008, Kevin Rudd (with Anthony Albanese as infrastructure minister) said we are going to do it!

And they did (study it that is). Spending around $20m on detailed studies, Phase 1 released in 2011, Phase 2 in 2013, and even asking a separate HSR Advisory group on the best way to plan, stage and build it all.

The plan was a dedicated high-speed network from Melbourne, to Canberra, Sydney and up to Brisbane. Over 1,600km of railway would be built, with a projected a cost of $60 to $100bn.

The report was clear - build the most impactful and economic route first, show people what we can offer, then move onto the harder, less economic routes. Stage 1 is Sydney to Canberra, then into Melbourne, and only then move north to Newcastle.

*Note the cost per km (in 2012 $$) - Sydney to Melbourne $56m, Sydney to Newcastle, $141m, almost 3x the cost.

Why

Sydney to Melbourne is the 6^th business air route in the world – in 2025 8.9 million people flew between the two cities. LINK. International examples are extremely clear, a HSR replaces air travel, especially for leisure customers.

For trips of up to three hours (eg Sydney- Melbourne and Sydney-Brisbane), observed HSR market shares range from around 55 per cent up to around 70 per cent (hurting Qantas/Virgin profits).

Chart below shows the relationship from travel time, to % market share.

Then, nothing... No HSR was ever built. The Advisory Group report even recommended to reserve land for the corridor, to save money and time for future governments if they choose to do so. But nothing much happened.

NSW

In 2018, the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian had enough – saying "I'm not going to wait for the other states and the Federal Government, we've waited too long so NSW will start the process,".

And NSW did! They hired British rail expert Andrew McNaughton to create the master plan and put up $295million for investigations and civil works. They examined many options, and in 2023, was pushing ahead with the final business case for the construction of a new, dedicated track for a train capable of travelling up to 250km/h from a station at Sydney’s Olympic Park to Newcastle, achieving the trip in one hour, with stops at Epping, Tuggerah, Gosford and Lake Macquarie.

Then, a change in premier, and Gladys was gone. In 2023, the NSW Govt abandoned all plans for fast rail – after investigating for over 4 years and spending at least $100m.

Today

In 2022, Albanese promised for the upcoming election a High-Speed Rail from Sydney to Newcastle, and has been working on this ever since.

In June 2023, they setup the High Speed Rail Authority, headquartered in Newcastle (coincidentally the same time the NSW Govt scrapped their plans?).

They got to work, and in December 2024, submitted the full business case to government. The plan is for 6 stations, Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Gosford, Sydney Central, Parramatta, and Western Sydney International Airport.

Total track is 194km, and to go through Sydney and up to Central Coast, 115km of tunnels is required. Only 38km of bridges and 41km surface track for this route.

In 2025, Infrastructure Australia provided their review and comments (more later), and in February 2026, the project entered a 2 year ‘Development Phase’. Total funding of $660 million to “advance design, approvals, corridor preservation, procurement, cost and schedule certainty before a later investment decision.”

The Government has outlined benefits of the project such as:

New Homes – the project will ‘unlock 160,000 new homes’ in Newcastle, Hunter Valley and Central Coast & Sydney. New jobs – support more then 99,000 new jobs in the corridor by 2061.
Faster Travel – current rail journey (2.5h) is slower then car train from Newcastle to Sydney.
Boost Tourism – easier access to Central Coast, Hunger Valley and Newcastle.
Economic – the HSRA claims more than $250bn economic benefit by 2086.
National Network – this is supposedly the first step of Brisbane Sydney Canberra Melbourne.

You can see the short summary explainer, or the 300 page business case (juicy parts redacted) on the HRSA Document Page.

Infrastructure Australia

After the business case was submitted, Infrastructure Australia legally must review and provide their opinion. LINK

They have supported the 2 year Development Phase, but in doing so, advised “it is currently not possible to make a confident assessment of the proposal’s benefit-cost ratio (BCR).”

The governments cost estimate in the Business Case is $93.6 billion (P90, nominal) in total. $61.2 billion for Newcastle to Sydney Central and another $32.4 billion to extend the line through Parramatta to Western Sydney Airport.

IA advised the project design is 10-15% complete, and “Given the large amount of tunnelling and the new rail systems, we expect costs to vary considerably as design maturity improves”.

If Infrastructure Australia is required to assess projects and provide a cost to benefit comparison, but cant, is that ok?

IA even went so far as to suggest a rethink of building to Newcastle first.

"we recommend that further work and consultation progresses on the entire East-Coast National HSR project....This should include..... reinforcing the sequencing of the Newcastle to Sydney section as the priority compared to all other sections (e.g. Melbourne to regional Victoria). HSRA has justified the Newcastle to Sydney section as the priority based on housing and employment benefits. This should be further justified alongside other key factors such as cost, constructability, travel-time savings, environmental impacts and lessons learnt.

The government says we must do Sydney to Newcastle to get better access to cheaper housing, so people can commute to Sydney, or business can relocate to Central Coast or Newcastle.

In addition to cost, IA is sceptical of the housing benefit. Remember from above the government is proposing 160k new homes from building the fast rail?

there is low confidence at this time that forecast housing benefits will be realised.

The final quote from the IA report sums up all of this, plus another issue - the trains cant go that fast in the tunnels!

Approximately 60% of Stage 1 would be in tunnels that are mostly located between the Central Coast, Central Sydney and Western Sydney International, which results in train speeds of up to 200km/hr, that are almost 40% slower than the theoretical maximum. HSRA advised that higher travel speeds would require a significantly larger tunnel diameter and have minimal impact on end to end journey times over the Sydney to Newcastle distance and would not justify the additional infrastructure costs. Shorter tunnels located along the corridor between the Central Coast and Newcastle are designed for maximum line speed (320 km/h). We also note that Stage 1 only results in around 5% of switching from cars. These outcomes, together with the risk of realising housing uplift, challenge the objectives of the National HSR project, requiring further substantiation that the Newcastle to Sydney section should be delivered first.

Finally, on the IA Report, they even question the governments savings of greenhouse emissions, noting the claim “does not align with IA’s Guide to assessing greenhouse gas emissions or relevant state government requirements"

Again, Full Report Here.

Tunnels

Now, I love high speed rail more than most. I have personally travelled (in one go) from London to Munich on rail (about 10h at the time) and more recently Berlin to Paris (8h on rail) and they were both great trips.

I want High Speed Rail in Australia to succeed, but I am sceptical this is the right way.

Take for example the tunnelling - 115km.

The Gotthard Base Tunnel, linking Switzerland and Italy together, is the world’s longest railway, and deepest traffic tunnel, with a length of 57km. Construction began in 199 and it opened in 2016, costing CHF $12bn, double the original estimates.

Look at our current track record of railway builds. Queensland's largest infrastructure project, Cross River Rail, is due to open in 2029, five years behind schedule, with costs ballooning from $5.4 billion to an estimated $19 billion.

The other projects around the country have all similar cost increases and delays.

What happens when the cost estimates are 50% mature and it blows out to $100bn +. Will this still happen?

Summary

China has built an insane High Speed Railway network from nothing. Europe, Japan and other countries all have existing HSR networks, and are building more. The world sees the benefit, but we have never even started laying 1m of dedicated HSR track.

I want HSRA to succeed, however I only see more questions:

Why is Sydney to Newcastle the required first choice, when the 2013 Study explicitly said otherwise
Why do we need to tunnel to Central, Parramatta and WSI - the Central to WSI leg alone costing $30bn.
Can we even do 115km of tunnels? Sydney Metro West is the longest (still under construction) at 24km.
Why spec trains to travel 320kph when the tunnels can only handle 200kph.
What happens if this is over budget and over time?

Look at the NBN. Grand plans of a national fibre network, implemented poorly, which allowed the opposition to promise a cheaper alternative. This turned out to be a ruse, and we are back to the original FTTP plan.

But at least one thing is true, there so much here to unpack there's a lot I can write about! Coming up: