Re: Overland to continue 4 another 2 years

[ender@axs.com.au (Vaughan Williams)]

> The population of France is 60 million people living in a country 
> smaller than the State of NSW.
> Paris alone has a population of 11 million people .
> There is no comparison whatsoever between the European situation 
> and Australia .
> We simply dont have enuf people to justify or support very fast trains

Right answer, wrong reasoning.

As I see it, talk of VFT's misses the point when we don't have a high
quality conventional rail service. Although Australia as a whole has a
low population density, if we accept that we don't need a regular
public transport service to the Nullabor Plain and that trains once an
hour to Mount Isa are a bit much, we can then look at what is really
needed.

Sweden has twice the population of the State of Victoria and is three
times the size. A lot of it is uninhabited as is, effectively, a lot
of the State of Victoria. The reality is that the majority of
Australians live in areas with perfectly reasonable population
densities (Victoria, SE SA, Eastern NSW and SE Qld). We can justify a
high quality, moderately fast (c.180kph) rail service between the main
centres. This can be done at modest cost compared with the VFT
proposals and has the added spinoff of benefiting freight.

Vaughan