this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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This is something (among many things) that just does not make any sense to me whatsoever. In a country as spread out as Aus, why do we have to rely on overworked long haul truckers on the road, as opposed to having a decent rail system?
Is it lack of funding? Lobbying? Lack of foresight? Ignorance? All of the above?
Am I completely missing something? My mind is boggled.
Oh, don't worry. It really is ridiculous. We actually used to have a gigantic rail system here (Victoria's network at its peak used to look like this, and the rest of Australia had similarly large networks). Over time and as cars and trucks became more viable, we did what the Americans did and began to axe more and more of our train lines. I'm not particularly well versed in the history of freight trains and trains outside of Vic, but I'd guess it's a similar thing to what happened to our passenger network. With a bit of money quietly slipped into the pockets of pollies, they began to commission heavily biased reports from people with vested interested in getting more cars on the roads to "justify" axing them.
Of course it's a little more complicated than that, but at the end of the day, when it comes to why private industries do/don't do things, it usually comes down to either finances or perception. At some point in time, it's become more financially viable to have things trucked rather than sending it even in part by rail, and the governments concerned never took drastic enough action to remedy it, so trains went bye bye.
(Also the fact mail often goes by plane now, and we outsourced most of our manufacturing and industry to other countries does not help)
jeff cannet have had an above average iq doing this shit
It's money. It's always money. If it were cheaper to ship stuff by rail than by truck, businesses everywhere would ship by rail.
There would be a point where rail is cheaper. I suspect it's at the point where you have a whole container. I only say this because while moving interstate (twice), I had a container of furniture and boxes that went by rail.
I've been out of removals for 7 years now but was ops manager for over 10 years and back then the rates between Syd and Melb were way cheaper than via road. Personal effects are relatively light compared to other freight so it was rare a container would exceed the free tonnage, you're talking like $400-500 back in 2016.
Back then the main problem with rail was the trains had to make it to Chullora or Yenorra and it shares the passager network, so if the trains ran late for whatever reason they would have to give way to the passenger services which basically meant between 6-10am the cargo trains don't move. I assume they still face the same problem today.
i actually don't think it's about money, it's more likely about the railways being too shit.
At least part of the melbourne-sydney route is single track, which greatly limits the amount of traffic you can have on the route. no single company is going to shell out for building new tracks, and having companies work together to fund it isn't much more likely.
The government is really the only instance with the power to decide to fix this, so the lack of rail transport generally boils down to a government actively choosing to not have rail transport.
the melb syd rail has loop de loops lmao
oh my god you're right, but only for one of the tracks sometimes?? that's so strange
so yeah, even if the tracks are in great condition they're still so squiggly that you're not going to be able to go particularly fast, like a lot of these curves are 300 meters in radius! that's going to force down speeds to below highway speed..
It's more the fact that you need to double handle containers, at the destination city, to get them on to a truck to the final destination. Which impacts the viability for shorter routes.
Melbourne / Sydney to Perth Freight is about 90% by rail or sea. Mainly because the longer distances make up for the extra costs incurred with double handling.