this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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It's an interesting idea to think about, but I doubt it would work on practice.
The biggest advantage trains have is scale. You can easily get a train capable of carrying hundreds of passengers that travels at high speed. High speed boats tend to be more like buses, carrying dozens of passengers.
I think boats would also be more affected by inclement weather conditions than would trains.
I'm having trouble finding data on it, but I don't think boats carrying large amount of passengers even go that fast. The best I can find says they tend to top out around 100, 110 km/h. To make the east coast route viable we need to be averaging (including time stopped at stations) somewhere around 200 km/h at least.
I think it would still work for Brisbane, the hydrofoil boats rise out of the water so they don't experience the jostling you get in a conventional boat. You can have several ferries running back and forth morning noon and night that carry hundreds of patrons per ferry. You don't need to build massive expensive tracks and they don't stop at every two bit town and suburb. These are only linking major population hubs. The hydrofoil here has a top speed of about 50km/h which is average, but it would be travelling in a straight line up and down the coast and the Brissy trains only ever get up to about 80km/h and you have to travel inland to hop on one in the Sunny coast.
Here's a video of the tech which could be scaled up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RUVfEWQcE
Oh yeah sorry, I mistook which thread this was in. I thought you were proposing an alternative to high speed rail for Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne trips. For a Redcliffe to Brisbane trip it might be a bit more viable, but the choke-point getting into the river past Fisherman Island might be an obstacle, and I think the speed limit in the river itself would be prohibitive to the boat being competitive with the existing train.
As for the sunny coast, there are already plans to add a rail link directly to the coast, and I think the problems with Redcliffe would be amplified on this route, thanks to the additional need to extend the trip to go around Bribie Island.
But I do love the out-of-the-box thinking.