Central body needed to coordinate rail freight reform – Part Two

By Francis Dwornik

To read Part One of this story click here

The most obvious organisation at the moment is the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC), which oversees the national rail industry and would be well placed to undertake the coordinated effort needed to handle the billions required to be spent in the next two decades.
Multiple decision-makers as we have today cannot respond to the tremendous challenges facing Australia’s rail freight network and the need to separate freight and passenger lines to drive home one of the rail industry’s primary advantages: that of significantly low, negligible carbon emissions compared to road freight.
Not only will these investments make rail more competitive with road transport but they will significantly reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by taking trucks off the road.
But none of this can happen when rail cargo is sharing the lines with passengers. To make rail truly viable there needs to be a significant duplication of rail tracks to ensure the passenger and freight trains are not competing. This will have major benefits for both the passenger and freight network and make both more competitive.
In terms of the need to separate lanes devoted to either passenger or freight movements, this is essential due to current restrictions. At the moment, freight trains can only operate outside six hours of designated peak-passenger hours in and out of Sydney, so as not to disrupt passenger network operations. This is unacceptable.
Solutions such as the Southern Sydney Freight Line (SSFL) whose works for the ARTC have begun – separating freight and urban passenger systems in Sydney from Chullora to Macarthur – have the ability, says ARTC, to free up 100 train paths a day for passengers. It also removes the current freight movement curfews in the south. A similar Northern line would do the same and achieve the same 100 passenger-train free-up.
The $2.1 billion South Improvement Alliance (SIA), of which O’Donnell Griffin Rail is an alliance partner with ARTC, is achieving drastic improvement in transit times between the cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It addresses bottlenecks and the huge wastage of time freight trains can spend sitting idle during a journey, by adding new passing lanes and more efficient signalling systems.
According to ARTC, these works will make rail freight competitive again, with each 1500-metre-long train replacing 100 semi-trailers.
Unless a radical long-term vision is employed to address the rail freight network, there will be a need to simply push more trucks onto the road network. This might appear prohibitive in terms of fuel pricing, environmental cost and urban congestion, but this is seriously the way the trend is going if national freight demand is to be met without the kind of wholesale reform around safety and productivity that is being recommended by the NTC and others.

Francis Dwornik is O’Donnell Griffin Rail’s (ODG) director rail engineering. He has helped realise a number of key projects for the ODG Rail team including rail infrastructure work on the Southern Suburbs Rail project in WA; ‘mine to market' projects such as BHP Billiton's Rapid Growth Phase project; the South Improvement Alliance for ARTC’s Melbourne to Sydney rail corridor upgrade; and more recently, the NovoRail Alliance partnership with RailCorp.