this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
64 points (100.0% liked)
Australian News
522 readers
39 users here now
A place to share and discuss news relating to Australia and Australians.
Rules
- Follow the aussie.zone rules
- Keep discussions civil and respectful
- Exclude profanity from post titles
- Exclude excessive profanity from comments
- Satire is allowed, however post titles must be prefixed with
[satire]
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australia
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Australian Politics
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
Banner: ABC
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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..