Region needs a friend not a fox
| Date: 02/06/2011 | | | Publication: Illawarra Mercury Section: News Page: 19 |
In recent weeks, the subject of very fast trains for Australia, and for one to come through Wollongong, has reappeared in the pages of your paper.
There is a very good case for such trains to service the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne corridor. Sydney-Melbourne, for example, is one of the busiest air corridors in the world and anyone who has driven the Hume Hwy knows how much freight travels that route.
However, it would be foolish to think that such a service could be diverted through Wollongong.
Consider what it would involve: begin at near sea-level in the Sydney region, climb to the heights of Heathcote, then descend the escarpment into the Illawarra for a stop in the Gong, only to climb back up that same escarpment to reach the Southern Highlands. This is engineering madness.
What Wollongong does need in rail transport are two things.
First, the completion of the Maldon-Dombarton line as a freight and passenger link to the Southern Highlands and to the employment opportunities of Campbelltown, Liverpool and even Parramatta.
The second great need is an upgrade of the present line to Sydney so that the 80km journey can be done in one hour.
Diversions from the original route between Coalcliff and Waterfall were made in the 1920s to create gentler gradients to allow the steam locomotives of that era to deal with increasing freight loads.
Unfortunately, these gradients involved many tight curves and consequently slower speeds. Realignment of the route, possibly involving some tunnelling, would allow our present generation trains to operate at their best.
However, I am not optimistic that either of these things will happen because one of the first acts of the O'Farrell government was to appoint as the head of a super transport authority Nick Greiner, the same Nick Greiner who when premier of a previous Coalition government cancelled the half-completed Maldon-Dombarton line.
Mr O'Farrell has put the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Les Gapps, Gwynneville.
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