Speedrail derailed?

["David Bennetts" <davibenn@ozemail.com.au>]

See today's Sydney Morning Herald.  According to Dr Phillip Laird, immediate
Past Chairman of the Railway Technical Society, straightening of the worst
20% of the 300km of line between Sydney and Canberra, employing conventional
or tilt trains would achieve significant time saving at a cost of 10% of
that of Speedrail.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0012/12/pageone/pageone1.html

My personal view is that a lot could be shaved off the existing timetable
now using existing Xplorer sets by replacing the primitive electric staff
safeworking between Canberra and Goulburn with train order working (at least
5 minutes at each of Queanbeyan, Bungendore and Tarago is wasted when the
driver has to stroll over to the signal box/communications room, unlock the
door, sink the peg and wrestle with the staff instrument to remove the peg
for the next section, ring control to let them know where he is, record an
entry in the book,  lock up again and saunter back to his cab.  Also a
reasonable amount of time could be shaved off if the temporary speed
restrictions weren't virtually permanent!   After all Xplorers are permitted
to travel at 145km/h if track conditions permit, at this speed they could do
Canberra/Sydney in just over two hours non-stop, if the track conditions
permitted!

In Britain using conventional trains, they beat inter-city bus schedules by
significant margins.  Here it is much quicker to travel Canberra/Sydney by
bus, despite rail being (normally) considerably faster in and out of Sydney
metropolitan area than is possible by road.  Like Britain, train fares
(except for concession travel) are much higher than for bus.  If rail
receieved the funding it deserved you wouldn't have the ancient semaphore
signals and steam age track alignments which limit performance and cause
operations to be so inefficent and costly to the community.


regards

David Bennetts
Bowral