Why Doesn’t Australia Have Better Trains?

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne.

Last year, more than 8.2 million seats were allocated to the flight route between Melbourne and Sydney, placing it among the world’s most heavily trafficked. (Before Covid, it was even busier.) That might seem surprising, giving Australia’s comparatively small population. But the reason lies in the alternatives, or lack thereof.

Suppose you were traveling between Tokyo and Hiroshima, also a distance of about 840 kilometers, or roughly 520 miles. You could fly, if you wanted. But you’d probably choose to take the high-speed train, which takes less than four hours and avoids the fuss of checking in, elbowing your way through airport security and traveling to and from the airport.

Going between Melbourne and Sydney — or even Melbourne and Canberra — you simply don’t have that option. And while you could take a painfully slow overnight train or tackle a drive of a similar length, it’s understandable that most people simply book a seat on a 90-minute flight.

For almost 40 years, politicians have been talking about a rail alternative. Yet despite decades of proposals, working groups and budgets drawn and redrawn, the main way to get around Australia’s Eastern Seaboard is still on a plane.

Rail enthusiasts in Australia might remember the “Very Fast Train” venture of the 1980s, or the Speedrail proposal of the 1990s, or even efforts in the mid-2010s to explore both high- and medium-speed rail between Australia’s eastern capital cities. All of these came to nothing.

All told, high-speed rail has been explored by governments led by John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, among others, to a total cost, according to one estimate, of around 150 million Australian dollars, or $100 million.