If they want move bus interchanges, itll need do swapsie with park factities but it really depends on the new toombul application that replaced damaged shops.. .. hope it can be TOD.
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Government Statement: First new SEQ train station in nearly a decade to open
⌠The first new station to join the South East Queensland rail network in almost a decade will open next week, servicing one of the countryâs fastest growing areas on the Gold Coast.
From Monday, 20 October, customers will be able to catch a train to and from the new Pimpama station for the first time.
Pimpama is the first new station to open on the South East Queensland network since the Redcliffe Peninsula line. âŚ
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Whilst on the one hand more stations on the GC is obviously a positive, overall, given a only â2 track corridorâ it just means, in total terms, transit between the two cities of BNE and GC gets slower.
At the end of the day weâre talking about 3 extra stations. Unless the frequency is already very very high, the benefit of the time saved expressing (60-90 seconds per station) will be outweighed by the benefit of the increased frequency at the new stations.
It will add at least 5-6 mins to the overall journey, although the station location and the alignment and speed of Cross River Rail will save 10 mins, so the overall time saving to and from Varsity Lakes could likely be 5-6 mins.
You also have Logan faster rail that could speed things up and save a minute or two.
Translink update page
Timetables will change at Coomera, Helensvale, Nerang, Robina and Varsity Lakes stations by up to two minutes to reflect the additional stopping time at Pimpama.
So they are looking to increase journey times to 6 mins with the three extra stations
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Government Statement: Laborâs Cross River Rail blowouts costs Queenslanders $19 billion
My question continues to be how much of this is a genuine blow out, or how much of it is creative accounting (eg. including lifetime costs as an upfront item, or including technically âseparateâ line items into the project, etc).
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Without itemised statements of what that $19 billion is argued to have been spent on itâs just not credible that journalists, and the then opposition were unable to uncover that level of overspend. $10+ billion would have to be hidden under other line items, where was it hidden?
They need to specify all parts of the cost to have credibility.
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Also when the LNP came into power, they found out the cost of CRR was 17bil$. And then they found an additional 2bil$ cost blowout one year after the LNP came into power?
How did it take 1 year to discover an additional cost blowout that was supposedly caused the the previous government who wasnât in power for said time?
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During ministerial statements in state parliament this morning, Transport Minister Brent Mickelberg â who last December put a $17 billion price tag on the project â said âextensive negotiations with contractorsâ had resulted in a revised total cost of $19.04 billion.
It was a far cry from the former Labor governmentâs $5.4 billion cost, but by the LNP governmentâs own admission the new figure included additional work throughout the train network that had not initially been included in Cross River Railâs line-item costs.
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So essentially, theyâre fudging the numbers and including items that werenât part of the original CRR price. Why am I not surprised 
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I donât really understand how it is 4 years away from passenger service given trains have already been tested through the tunnels and fitouts of the stations are well underway.
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political, LNP trying to make Labor look bad.
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Iâve tried to come up with a possible guess as to how this figure could have come about.
This is according to the latest QTRIP that actually contained any cost figures, 2024-2025 (so much for Labor obfuscating costs)
CRR was $6.3bn, add onâŚ
- Queensland Train Manufacturing Program - $4.869.000
- European Train Control Systems Signalling Program: Phase 1 (Pilot line, Tunnel, and Sector 1 to Moorooka) - 1.318.322
- Clapham Yard Stabling (Moorooka), construct stabling yard - $532.356
- New Gold Coast Stations - $500.000
- New Generation Rollingstock, European Train Control System fitment, install new signalling - $380,484
- New Generation Rollingstock, Automatic Train Operation and Platform Screen Doors fitment - $275.700
- QTMP Enabling Works, Ormeau - $246.900
- Mayne Yard Accessibility, upgrade vehicle and pedestrian access - $173.411
- Rail station access improvements - $155.818
- Station Upgrades Fairfield to Salisbury - $105.355
- Inner City Signalling Upgrades - $74.739
- Breakfast Creek Bridge, realign track - $48.455
- Roma Street surface station integration - $35.000
- Breakfast Creek Bridge Replacement - $28.000
- Mayne Yard Relocations - $27.337
- Cross River Rail Tunnel Maintanence Plant - 12.050
- Inner Northern Busway, Roma Street, improve bus station - $12.000
- Bowen Bridge Road to Exhibition Station, upgrade rail pedestrian connection - $8.000
- Moorooka bus rail interchange upgrade - $8.000
Unless I missed something, all this adds up to $15.1bn, at which point a fairly typical cost blowout in percentage terms easily starts to add up to around the sorts of figures the LNP have been throwing around.
There were a couple of extra budget items I could have thrown in, and maybe some of these are unreasonable guesses, but if the government gives us zero information on how they came to their figure, then they cannot expect people to be generous and trusting in imagining how the government came to that figure.
I must say, while a few of these are entirely just CRR works. Including the costs of station accessibility upgrades, or NGR upgrade works the Newman govternment cheaped out on, or asset renewal/upgrade projects like ETCS or some of the bridges, into the CRR project cost would be a very disingenous decision that ignores the fact these are absolutely necessary and justified on their own merits regardless of CRR, and that lumping them with CRR from a project delivery perspective does not mean that the costs themselves should be seen as part of CRR itself.
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I mean yeah that much is obvious but whatâs the plan here? Stop works for a couple of years so the timeline matches up? Open next year and say that the LNP saved 3 years of work? The lie would instantly come undone
If they actually do drag things out to 2029 then the budget will blow out way more thanks to paying contractors to just stand around.
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Not enough trains. Thatâs the main issue.
Running an improved timetable with the current fleet allocation is simply not possible until QR gets enough new trains from Torbanlea and a place to store them at Ormeau.
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So 3 to 4 years away from full service. It can open on a reduced service (i.e. the current frequencies).
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bUt wHy wOUlD wE dO tHaT oN a rEduCEd sErViCe wHeN wE cAn wAiT