Re: Media, railways and facts.

[Craig Haber <albatross@harnessnet.com.au>]

Barry Campbell wrote:
> I fear that the alternative in both SA and Vic will be wholesale abandonment
> of bg lines.

IMHO, there was (and is) little to gain by converting rural Victoria's
BG lines to SG, and I would not have converted any lines.  Reasoning is
as follows...

Why convert the state system to SG?  There is not a significant amount
of traffic which comes off the intrastate system onto interstate
trains.  With the formation of NRC, any such freight has to be
transhipped from train-to-train anyway, so the guage is basically
irrelevant.  V/Line has little role in interstate SG operations, so has
little to gain from a standard guage fleet of loco's and wagons.  In
short, it costs a lot of money to convert, but I don't see that it
generates any more revenue, or reduces many costs.  Why break an
integrated intrastate freight operator into two inflexible halves, where
transhipment of intrastate traffic has to be re-introduced to get
loading to where we want it (eg Wimmera grain to Geelong, or North-West
grain to Portland).  And the difficulties in getting SG around the BG in
a partial conversion are enormous.  Hence you end up with facilties like
the NRC Steel Terminal where you have to tranship everything....

IMHO, they basically got it right when they did the Albury SG.  It got
modern safeworking, was kept out of the way of most of the BG network,
and they got rid of problem areas by spending money and doing it
properly, such as the North Melbourne and Jacana flyovers, Wangaratta
'tunnel' etc.  They even built flyovers over station access roads!  It
wasn't perfect, it was built to last 30 years (and we've now gone nearly
40 so it's falling to bits), but they did a pretty good job.  

The Melb-Serviceton SG on the other hand is a disaster.  It's a
half-finished job that nobody wants to fix.

What did it cost to convert the western wheat lines?  $20 million wasn't
it?  And $5 million Ararat-Dunolly.  That $25 million would have gone a
long way to a suitable track arrangement to handle BG and SG traffic
between Maroona and Dimboola, without segregating the V/Line Freight
network.

I feel there is little justification to do it properly (that is, convert
everything), and if it's not done properly, then the problems created
could be the system's downfall.  Hence seperate the interstate stuff
from intrastate as per Melb-Albury SG, and let them operate as seperate
entities.  But too late now.....

Cheers,
CH.
-- 
Craig Haber
albatross@harnessnet.com.au
Manufacturing Systems Engineer (B. Eng, RMIT 1998)
Web Page Designer, Harness Racing, Railways, and Essendon Football Club
fanatic
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