This thread is for exploring non-HSR upgrade strategies for Australia.
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The Swiss approach to improving rail services after plans for HSR were rejected by Swiss voters.
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In terms of the line between Sydney and Brisbane, putting aside the known quantity that is the exit from Sydney heading north to Gosford, the current alignment between Newcastle (technically Maitland) and Taree through Dungog and Gloucester, is downright diabolical. The current XPT scheduled travel time between these is just shy of 3 hours, which is about double what it takes by road on the A1.
While a wholesale rebuild with a route more similar to the A1 would likely be the realm of a HSR build, surely some tactical straightening should be able to bring that down towards 2 hours.
I am a little disappointed the ~1.5bn earmarked from cancelling Inland Rail seems to be only for resilience projects rather than considering projects which could provide good bang for buck to eliminate things like nasty curves etc. and speed up travel.
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The bit from Warabrook to Hexham is quite fast. Even to Metford isn’t too bad.
Not sure how much can be done through suburban Maitland without mass resumptions, and you have the junction from the Main North to the North Coast Line, which is always going to slow things down.
Once you get past Maitland Vale Rd is where real opportunities begin. A lot of the land is open fields, so resumptions shouldn’t be overly expensive, and maybe some land swaps could be done, i.e. give a farmer the old corridor in exchange for a the new one, and some extra money to help rebuild fencing etc.
I can see plenty of opportunities for straightening/curve easing at least as far as Wauchope.
Some stations might need to be relocated, too. For example, I understand that you can’t just plough through Middle Brother NP, but why does the rail line then go to be Kendall, and not Kew, which would be far more direct.
The other consideration should be for the reduction in fuel consumption for freight trains.
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If a tunnel will limit trains to 200 km/hr then this should be compared to surface mix options that also try to achieve this goal.
A reasonable position. In the stretch of track we’re talking about above I do think some tactical tunnelling (tunnels in the order of a few hundred metres up to 1-2km) would avoid a number of very tight curves as the track winds around river valleys. Use of viaducts could be an alternative to tunnelling worth exploring to try and achieve a straighter alignment too. The current alignment is what you expect from the era of its construction - essentially allergic to bridges unless absolutely necessary because they’re expensive 
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An interesting result of the Newcastle HSR study was essentially that you can’t have HSR on the corridor because the tunnels will limit train speeds to 200 km/hr max.
Yes, but I presume that is a function of cost:benefit in tunnel design. Single bore tunnels take the bow wave for oncoming trains out of the equation; train design minimises various various effects like sonic boom, air resistance etc.
Shinkansen trains in Japan typically run far faster than 200kph through tunnels - even lengthy ones. A key exception is the Seikan Tunnel linking Honshu and Hokkaido because the tunnel is shared with 1,067mm freight and the bow wave effect was determined could be destructive to the narrower and less well weight-distributed freight trains.
So presumably the issue is less a hard constraint, but a function of the cost of enabling tunnelling vs what you get out of it. So if you are hard-capped to 200kph when leaving Sydney, the distances aren’t that huge, and you’re not having to decelerate and lose momentum to meet this new speed limit. It would be a bigger problem if 320-360kph open sections in later phases require continual deceleration to 200kph for tunnels interspersed along the route.
In terms of what I’m asking for with the existing line between Brisbane and Sydney, I would think an XPT/R set average running speed of at least 100kph should be the minimum objective (excepting the urban tracks in Brisbane and Sydney), so the target travel time should be 10-11 hours, down from the current ~14 hours. We’re largely stuck with what we have leaving Sydney, but as noted above, the section north of Maitland is a section where there’s potential to make some gains. Trying not to be too greedy asking for anything like the XPT/R sets actually being able to run closer to their 160kph design speeds .
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One tool worth pointing out (apologies to those already familiar) is Open Railway Map, which visualises the Open Street Map rail data. It’s got a fair chunk of the Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne speed data entered in, and you can really see how slow and curvy most of the alignment is
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Bit of an old story but still worth discussing imo. Sydney to Canberra HSR will still be decades away if the Newcastle HSR completion date is to be believed. I think this is a very good initiative while the wait for HSR continues.
In a perfect world, these sorts of upgrades would happen to the Brisbane and Melbourne XPT lines to speed things up. I also think the XPT services (if HSR is ever built) could be turned into sleeper/overnight trains to complement the HSR service. Thereby they don’t actually need to be faster but just a smoother lest rickety experience.
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XPTs are a few years from being retired. R sets are replacing them, and they have no sleeper cars.