The study was released jointly by AECOM, one of the world's experts on modelling fast trains for governments, and Australia's peak infrastructure lobby group, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA). It urges the government to identify new routes and either buy the land or put in planning protections to ensure future land price increases do not make a high-speed rail network a prohibitive option. It mentions that such a rail project would have a big impact on the taxi, airline and airport industries. The government and opposition threw their support behind the report yesterday, and reconfirmed that a $20 million scoping study would be put out for tender. Modelling by AECOM/IPA indicates the land corridor is worth $13.7 billion at today's prices but will balloon to $57 billion by 2030. "Failure to protect these corridors now will increase their cost in the future and could put a complete network out of Australia's financial capacity," the report warns.

Proposals to build a high-speed rail have been under consideration by the private sector since the mid-1980s. To date, no proposal has proven commercially viable. This report outlines an indicative corridor where the stations would be, but suggests that engineering studies would be required to determine the exact location of the new routes. It recommends the corridor be built incrementally and shared with different types of infrastructure such as water, electricity and the national broadband network to make it financially viable and strategic. "Travelling between Sydney and Melbourne - currently the third busiest air corridor in the world - could be reduced to less than three hours,'' says the report. High-speed rail is being rolled out in countries across Europe, the US and Asia as a way to link up major cities, reduce congestion and battle pollution. France, Spain, Japan, Taiwan, Britain and Portugal are just a few of the countries with high-speed rail. China and Germany have high-speed rails under construction.

A key recommendation of the report is that the construction phase begins in five years on an incremental basis, starting with Sydney to Newcastle or Canberra, on the basis that it avoids the $15 billion cost of developing a new airport to service Sydney. Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese said the study was a valuable contribution, particularly its emphasis on preserving infrastructure corridors, which was consistent with the government's strategic planning approach. "Federal Labor is investing $20 million on the high-speed rail study for the eastern seaboard," he said. "This builds on federal Labor's record investment in rail during its first term, which saw a tenfold increase in rail compared to the former coalition government." Shadow finance minister Andrew Robb said yesterday the study hit the nail on the head in terms of the need to consider and resolve the role of high-speed rail. "Australia must avoid the mistakes of the past, where insufficient long-term planning saw the loss of land that should have been protected for rail and road projects, which has meant that expensive and complex tunnelling has been the only option to get critical projects delivered," he said.

The report forecasts an 86 per cent chance that Australia will need a very fast train by 2030, rising to 93 per cent by 2050. The east coast of Australia accounts for most of the country's GDP, 75 per cent of employment and 63 per cent of economic activity and houses 60 per cent of the population, as well as bearing most of the national congestion concerns. IPA chairman Mark Birrell, who is also a director of the Government's Infrastructure Australia, said Australia had been down the path of very fast trains before but had got nowhere because planning had not translated into action. "This time Australia needs to settle on and protect an alignment and begin to incrementally deliver an east coast fast-rail network." Loading "Even though it is a long-term project, we need to start in-depth planning and protect the corridors to ensure the network remains an economically viable option for the future.''

AECOM has been involved in some of the more high-profile high-speed rail projects globally, including France's TGV and Britain's HS2 project.