“High Speed Rail” has been in the news again lately, after government leakers have suggested the idea that a high speed link could be built to Geelong by combining the project with Metro II – an underground link from Southern Cross to Newport via Fishermen’s Bend.

While it is easy to get excited about big shiny fast proposals, it is important to remember why and where they are coming from.

“High Speed” to Geelong

This proposal from the Federal Government came during the 2019 federal election campaign, though it appears to be based on ideas from the State election the year before. Essentially, the Liberal National Coalition, having promised $5 billion towards a link to the Airport that would require additional track capacity in the form of a tunnel between Sunshine and the City, also promised $2 billion towards using that tunnel as link to a faster Geelong Line.

What does High Speed actually mean though? Their vague promises seem to imply that it would mean trains ran at 200-300km/h for some of the journey. However, we already have trains that are built for 160km/h that spend most of their time going slower as they have to stop at stations. So realistically, a high speed railway would be one that made very few stops between Melbourne and Geelong, and therefore benefit very few people. Given that our trains are already quite well used, would any benefit from slightly faster journey times actually be worth it? Especially when this means that you would have to run the existing service anyway to maintain the same level of service to the intermediate stations.

The Tunnel

The link between Southern Cross and Newport has its origins in the 2012 Metropolitan Network Development Plan, which would see a new tunnel between Clifton Hill and Fishermen’s Bend via Southern Cross to separate Mernda (then South Morang) and Hurstbridge trains. Gunzels then extrapolated the idea that extending the new Metro (dubbed Metro II) to Newport to add capacity to the Werribee, Altona Loop and Williamstown Lines. This seems to be the case in the leaked updated NDP that hasn’t been released publicly.

This tunnel is designed to be like Metro I, an inner city capacity creating project that allows for simple, consistent operation of Metro Lines. By running a “high speed” line through the same tunnel as all stopping trains, you complicate service patterns, with a potential mix of rolling stock and operators. As the tunnel would have new underground stations, the design of rolling stock would have to meet platform screen door requirements meaning the two different stock types would have to compromise on their layouts.

Others have suggested building a four bore tunnel instead of twin tunnels, however this would make the project a lot more expensive, given that the tunnel is going to be longer than Metro I, and would require more complicated track work to allow for terminating the Geelong trains.

What is possibly the most disappointing part is that the leaks from the department seem to suggest we are back to the planning where the Feds offer money for certain types of projects, and state bureaucrats are forced into creating or compromising their well thought out plans so something is built regardless of what its benefit will be.

So what do I think?

From an outsider’s perspective, the most pressing issue on the Geelong Line is not the travel time, but the service pattern. Tarneit station being the busiest on the V/Line network after Southern Cross is not sustainable, especially with that area only growing.

Tarneit is an issue as it is a single station serving one large growth area. It is infamous for not having enough car parks, however, it has this issue due to the large distances between stations in the area, making other forms of transport impractical for most potential users. While the bus network could be upgraded, having so many people using each train at one station does not work, and there needs to be more access points to the line. The RRL was built with provision for stations at Truganina, Davis Road and Sayers Road, and these need to be built to spread the load. They could also be used to provide integrated town centres for these rapidly growing suburbs.

Adding more stops to the Geelong Line is of course the opposite of high speed rail, so in addition to building these stations, I would also propose quadding the line between Sunshine and Wyndham Vale, electrifying the Sunshine-Wyndham Vale section and handing it’s operation over to Metro. This would benefit Geelong trains by allowing them to run express, with say Wyndham Vale retained as a connection station, but otherwise running express for faster journey times.

This would keep Geelong trains on the RRL with Bendigo and Ballarat trains, which would allow V/Line to have control over the whole corridor and therefore better control over their own services, and likewise for Metro.

This still leaves the issue of capacity between Sunshine and the city, however I think that a short link between Sunshine and Newport via the Brooklyn line would help with that. I might write more on that in the future.