Very little freight travels by TGV. It is mostly on the autoroutes, or tollways.

In part this is a function of lack of very fast trains across larger distances between countries in Europe. Going from say France to Poland or Belarus or southern Italy by rail remains an epic, and about ten times as costly as flying on Ryanair or Wizz or similar low fare carriers.

Changing modes on large freight consignments is a costly business, and when it comes to more time sensitive consignments European air freight carriers like Cargolux similarly do it profitably for a fraction of the taxpayer underwritten rail networks.

It is no good berating people for lack of vision when there is a functioning service which is in many instances faster, and always cheaper, and involves no public monies.

Ultimately, this route from the far western suburbs to Chatswood could be continued to the western side of the Sydney CBD via a much needed second harbour rail crossing.

These opportunities are so comparatively inexpensive, and so easy to implement, that they will of course, never happen.

On the point of de-clogging out cities (which i must admit sounds a bit ambiguous at face value). The fundamental design of all the Australian cities is “hub and spoke”. One principle CBD, one airport, one port and one central train station etc etc. From that all of the punters tend to generally live on out the burbs and the essential design is one where all roads tend to link to the city or the piece of critical infrastructure with few ring roads.

For as long cities have this design, they are destined to grid-lock as LA does so famously. Government’s can respond by building more roads, they result is even more congestion, Braess Paxadox ensures this (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=removing-roads-and-traffic-lights).

If we build rail efficiently with appropriate ring loops and trunk lines to feed a VFT system that is where the potential lies to reduce congestion. Sure more people might drive to their local train station, but that is a lot better than all those same people all heading for the airport. Even in insolvent California they have started to build a system (Google: California High Speed Rail) because the realization has occurred that the old model of more people, then more freeways and centralized infrastructure cannot continue to work.

Explain to us the bit about declogging the cities of France. Or indeed any cities.

Efficient public transport facilitates the dense settlement of cities. There has been no declogging in terms of density of habitation of any major city on earth I can think of which has integrated layers of public transport services.

Not that I mind the consequences of this in my much loved Paris.

Cities without adequate public transport, such as Los Angeles or Dallas, have dramatically unclogged in very sense except on the freeways. That is, the density of population has fallen to fractions of the levels of Paris, London or Tokyo through the sprawl we call urban decentralisation .

If we look at LA or Dallas or even Kansas City it becomes apparent that the human response to the inconvenience caused by obnoxious driving conditions is to change the concepts of centralised work places. LA is more a collection of internet connected ‘silicon villages’ than ever before. No-one has a reference point in LA that equates to lower Manhattan.

Melbourne and Brisbane can imitate LA or Kansas City, although I hope they don’t do so on a massive scale. Sydney cannot. The limits of the Sydney basin are now turning into urban prison walls, and it will decline until or unless it seriously addresses in metropolitan transport needs.

Read the actual science. Starting with the GISS. The liberation of fossilised carbon through power generation is 80% of the problem according to James Hansen.

Carbon that is harvested from the atmosphere is taken out and put back in short term carbon exchange cycles. Carbon liberated from coal and oil overwhelms the natural carbon exchange cycles, and adds to the thermal opacity of the natural greenhouse gas effect.

Blurring the distinctions between the regular short term natural carbon exchanges and the abrupt and massive release of fossilised carbon by industry has provided the escape hatch for the government and its dishonest carbon reduction targets by allowing it to count reductions that mean zip, while ignoring the need to curb coal.

When, or if, the history of this massive screw up is written, those who failed to make a careful distinction about where the excess of carbon is coming from will be exposed as populist fools, easily taken for a ride by the vested interests in fossil fuels.

Sure we “over invested” and had a bit of debt to pay off. Sure there was a bit of wastage and a lack of prudent behavior by government, but what resulted from this killer amount of investment was lasting infrastructure that gave the impetus to help continue Australia’s growth.

Railways aren’t known for the profitability. Heck, just about every private railway operator from the era went broke from competition from the sea. Nor are they known for their ability to be delivered on-time and on-budget. However the positive impact of railways in immeasurable. Sure Qantas, Tiger and the likes would be able cram 800 or so people into one of these giant flying walruses and make a profit. Compared to a railway line that costs ~$30/40bn or so, on the pure sum’s, railway doesn’t look like a good idea.

The potential here as many people have addressed is to start to de-clog our cities. As the French did, create a cultural shift towards rail that will take time. The environment benefits are immense. Ben it doesn’t matter if your burning carbon from the ground or carbon from some algae, it’s still more carbon into the atmosphere - your only benefit is more price stability. At least with electrified rail, it can benefit from a (here’s hoping for) change in base load generation or at least a cleaning up of.

Another point that might make all those feeling embarrassed at the current situation. Canada, the country that is so very similar to Australia is also stuck in the same time warp. Toronto + Montreal are closer than Sydney - Melbourne, have larger populations and both have very good metros (particularly Montreal…maybe its a french thing). They are still yet to build a VFT connection these two cities, all is a mid speed service

And something to add to comments about the XPT: it’s not a VFT as such, but it is a locally-built variant of the fastest diesel train in the world, the British HST. Yes, this 200 km/h machine spends most of its time idling around the less than complementary colonial infrastructure of NSW.

Caution is a prerequisite in these things.

Contrails however are widely misunderstood, especially some 40 years after methanol water injection was variously banned or phased out because of far more economical engine designs.

The contrails you see from anything made in the past 20 years are caused by existing water vapour condensing on the nuclei provided by fine particles of soot. That is why they often appear to be discontinuous. No pre-existing water vapour, no contrail. Contrails do not appear at all in the intermediate technology tests of gas to liquid fuels…which are in themselves a dead end but useful as a preparation for algal fuels. The reason they no longer appear is that there is no soot produced by them.

But there are still issues with the generation of nitrous oxides by jet engines. These emissions have been reduced in the latest designs but much more needs to be done, especially as they may continue to be a problem with algal blends and ultimately pure algal fuels. The difficulty is that really hot combustion processes can’t avoid burning nitrogen, hence emitting two types of nitrogen by products.

It is important to engage public opinion enough to force the engine makers to lay off the green rhetoric and disclose the green metrics. Yes, the results are pretty impressive. But are we entitled to be ‘happy.’ Not yet.

1) there is a lot of hype, and not yet a lot of substance, surrounding algal fuels. Until that substance is delivered it would be prudent not to get too excited about it.
2) even if you run your aircraft on biofuel (or hydrogen), there is also concern that aircraft contrails cause significant additional warming effects. This can be avoided if you run your aircraft below the altitudes at which contrails form, but as you know that will increase aircraft fuel consumption.

Taking those two factors into account, I wouldn’t be so certain that it will be possible to use aircraft in an environmentally benign way.

There is no doubt that photosynthesis is the most efficient means of harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere. However it is one of the least efficient methods of harvesting energy from the sun.

For one thing, biomass as n[CH2O] has a lower energy content than transport fuel, n[CH2] . For another, the harvested material is composed of 90-99% water, which consumes energy to remove. Without outside power, an algal fuel farm returns most of its carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere and a minority of the carbon is sold as fuel. Considering that diesel is also used on the farm, the environmental value is questionable.

If however, a (probably remote) algae farm were combined with a solar farm, the intermittent solar supplier would be provided with an intermittent consumer and the biomass n[CH2O] could be upgraded to aviation fuel n[CH2], or at least, dried refinery feedstock.

When fuel refineries use nuclear sources of chemical hydrogen, the algal fuel would be partly energised by nuclear, but the carbon would be wholly sourced from the atmosphere.

Too rough. In an unguarded moment Billie Glover, the Boeing algal guru told a conference in Sydney that it would only be necessary to bury Belgium in algal ponds. Starting with Brussels.

Mind you, if the reports about the chemical richness of the Gulf of Mexico or the aptly named Black Sea are correct, half the chemical feedstocks required are already conveniently in one place, where there are longer any other forms of marine life left to worry about.

This very minute I’m going to print your comment.

Cheers V

I’m not arguing against public transport. I’m arguing about the incompetent provision of public transport in Australia. It could have been an order of magnitude better for the same money had it been managed competently. Let’s get that right, and then move forward.

Personally I can’t see, to my regret, where high-speed rail would be viable in Australia, at least not unless energy prices are dramatically higher than now. (ie it might be viable in 20-30 years’ time). We simply don’t have the number of population centres close enough to make it viable. Sydney-Canberra has the distance, but not the population at the Canberra end. Melbourne-Sydney has the traffic, but the distance is too great for the train to be competitive in time with the airlines.

Meski - agreed, far too little has been done with virtual meeting technology. Or telecommuting for that matter. This use of lots of energy for moving big lumps of meat around when what we’re moving around is ideas and communications contained in said meat is pretty silly . See what’s available in ten years’ time.

James McDonald - climbing hills doesn’t matter as much as you’d think with energy consumption of electric trains because they can use regenerative braking on the way back down to convert some of the potential energy they’ve acquired climbing back into electricity. IIRC the TGV routes actually use some pretty steep gradients as it’s a higher priority to minimise the route distance by making it as direct as possible. Also with a high-speed train the proportion of energy use going to aerodynamic drag compared with hill climbing is going to be lot higher (remember drag goes up with the square of the speed, energy spent climbing stays constant)

The Toulouse metro is more like the Docklands Light Rail, charming in a way but I wonder if a NSW rail planner was involved as some of the stations were made with platforms too short for more than two cars and this first line has outgrown its designed capacity very quickly.

The second riot I ever saw in Paris was a huge demonstration over the poor quality of railway food. I felt for a moment that I have arrived in the bosom of a grand civilisation. But only for a moment, because the first riot had been one of the street insurrections inspired by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and they were bloody affairs.

Venise,

The A380 has an astonishing wing, which allows it to take off and land slower than other jets, and use less runway, even on a long haul flight. If the current version was fitted with 800+ economy seats and flown on domestic routes it could climb to any altitude up to its limit of 43,000 feet very promptly.

One of things about larger aircraft is that when you divide the structural weight and fuel burn by the number of seats the efficiency of scale drives both metrics sharply lower. Such jets will be used by low fare carriers, and will tend to keep fares very low even if fuel costs go sky high in the years between the onset of peak oil scarcity and the validation of algal fuels , as some analysts predict.

If private capital will fund a Sydney-Melbourne high speed rail, let it roll. But at the moment a privately funded airline can provide departures as close as 15 minutes apart for a tiny fraction of that investment, as they do today.

I’m too tired to go into it but the Premier of Victoria is one of the most deplorable premiers of Oz, and just now he has had his piccy taken, with the head of the VRC, having boosted the Melbourne Cup winnings for next year by half a million dollars.
Just in case you can’t bear all the fun things about Melbourne; apparently the English queen is coming to Oz-or is it the other way around? And Brumby has yet made it known if he will entertain her or not. Can you put up with the mad excitement of it all? I am suffused with what? I wont say it I’ll only get edited.

‘Night.

The incredible energy advantage of trains over other modes actually improves with the distance between stops and hills. Trains spend most of their energy accelerating up to travelling speed and climbing hills. Australia has lots of distance and not many hills. Once at travelling speed, the shape of a modern VFT creates very little air resistance. The nose breaks the air just once, and every carriage rides in the slipstream of the one in front — the same reason why cyclists cluster together in the Tour de France. Friction of the wheels on the rails is very low compared to the friction of tyres on a road.

What that means, is that the energy cost of a 100km leg between stops is only a little bit more than that of a 50km leg, as long as there aren’t too many hills to climb. (And modern trains, if they climb hills, are able to reclaim some of that energy on the way back down by electromagnetic induction.)

If ever there was a country made for rail, Australia is it. Most of the cities are arranged in a line close to the east coast, the distances are large, the hills few.

“Kevin Rudd led his Opposition throughout 2007 talking about the need to lift productivity and the need to ease infrastructure bottle-necks. Labor should have had a list of infrastructure projects in mind before they won Government. They should have got them shovel-ready in 2008 instead of mucking around with talkfests. “

There’s another global economic crisis coming, and another and another, it’s just a matter of when. If big stimulus spending is to be the standard response to these, then we need to spend some time in the the intervening years doing the studies and planning so we’ve got some useful “shovel ready” projects good to go.

Or do we just leave it until the last minute next time we’re standing here with a shovel in one hand and $40 billion in the other, and eyeing off some school buildings or perhaps some rocks and barrels of white paint?

Do the studies for VFT and other rail projects, draw up the plans, the time to spend the (borrowed) money will come again before too long.