Re: [SA] Adelaide hills line

[Dion Williams <onamission@today.com.au>]

Brown Family wrote:

> I think it can go quite a bit faster if the appropriate by-passes are
> built. I think an ideal target would be to get passenger timings down
> to eight hours or less.

Speeds of 140km/h IMO simply aren't necessary; much more can be done,
more cheaply, to divert the line in various places and upgrade it to
allow 100-110km/h average running rather than have the expense of mass
realignment that would be needed for superfast speeds. Adequately
serving centres between Melbourne and Adelaide would make the time
savings of extra high speeds harder to achieve in any case.

> 2/ Sunshine-Ararat, ideally bypassing Ballarat itself. Whilst NCR can
> justify standardising the Cressy line for slow freight, such
> justifications cannot apply to passenger trains and time-critical
> freight services such as Trailerail. Eventually some other way of
> getting to Ballan from Bacchus Marsh is going to have to be built,
> that avoids the horseshoe curve. Assuming that some other way will be
> built, this will reduce the Kms between Melbourne and Ararat from 267
> kms to about 210kms. This means a saving of about 15-25 minutes
> depending on load and motive power.

I think Ballarat would have to be included as a stop for any passenger
services, at least on daylight runs, but otherwise some deviation around
it is necessary IMO.
 
> Together with deviations in S.A. and improvements in signalling and
> crossing loop length and spacing, eight hours would be very
> achievable.

The potential for a tilt-train style service over this run would be
excellent with the improvements outlined, possibly even reducing the
time under eight hours. With a scope for improvement that the
Sydney-Melbourne and Sydney-Brisbane routes just don't have, it could be
the best passenger service in Australia with not too great an effort;
squeezing cash from the road builders in Canberra on the other hand may
be a more challenging task.

Dion