The start of a new year turns our thoughts toward the year ahead, while the end of the first decade of the 21st Century in one year’s time gives us further pause for reflection and thought.

There’s been some points about the rail industry ripe for debate that have been rolling around in my mind for a while that I think are worth sharing. In no particular order, they are as follows:

1. Australian railways are world leaders in the bulk haulage of minerals across long distances from pit to port. However, the mining industry and the minerals they extract will be among the first to suffer in any sort of any scheme to price greenhouse gas emissions. Does this mean that our world leading heavy-haul railways are fast becoming dinosaurs?

Are the extensive investments by government (particularly in NSW and Queensland) to upgrade the rail element of the coal supply chain and the heavy private sector investment in the Pilbara iron ore railways an example of poor decision making by rail operators and infrastructure owners? While the miners of the Pilbara could be excused for trying to maximise their profits and get as much out of the ground before an ETS starts ‘taxing’ their off-shored profits, are ARTC and QR gambling on a losing horse by expending a big chunk of the finite budget for rail infrastructure on mineral heavy haulage? Could that pot of money have been ‘gambled’ on rail technology that had better long-term prospects, such as upgrading the interstate mainlines for intermodal freight or improving urban public transport?

2. Over on ‘the ‘Page’, there’s a spirited debate about electrification of the interstate rail network. While most of the commentary is pure pie in the sky, an important question is raised about how the power will be produced for mainline electrification (and also for any future high-speed rail corridors). Again, one of the fundamental issues is the reliance on black and brown coal for baseload electricity generation in Australia, largely due to plentiful supplies and the relatively low cost and short lead times for building new coal-fired power stations.

Again, the introduction of some sort of ETS or other pricing regime for carbon emissions could place other sources of baseload generation on a more competitive footing with coal. This would mean that the nuclear option for baseload energy generation comes back on the table for rail electrification, along with other, renewable sources of energy generation, as outlined in this report from the Parliamentary Library. This prompts me to ask the question, does supporting mainline electrification and high-speed rail in Australia necessarily mean supporting nuclear power in Australia? It does seem to be presented as a mutually exclusive argument that you can’t have one without the other. On the other hand, do new models of distributed generation of baseload power using renewables at a number of dispersed sites (based on solar thermal concentration and geothermal technology) for traction power supply and augmented by solar photovoltaics and hydro-electricity provide a better way to electrify the interstate mainlines and future high-speed corridors than a cluster of nuclear reactors along the Great Dividing Range of the eastern states?

Personally, I’m still undecided on nuclear power in Australia and if there were an alternative to coal and nuclear generation of baseload power, I’m all for it.

3. What to do with the spiderwebs of rural branchlines that are the legacy of the high-water mark of railway construction in the 19th and 20th Century. Do we declare them as assets of importance and try to keep them going, even with the ‘last resort’ traffic of seasonal grain? Do national and state governments pass legislation to compel the carriage of dangerous goods (fuel, chemicals) by rail to provide some additional non-seasonal traffic for these lines and fund an upgrade to the lines serving the major country fuel depots so that derailments don’t shift the danger of dangerous goods from road to rail? Are there other options for revitalising and upgrading these rural branchlines?

Or is the decision made to abandon the rural branchlines and many of the settlements they once served (and now only pass through) to better consolidate settlement in rural and regional Australia into the larger centres? There would perhaps be a new role for these branchlines in supplying the great retreat of European settlement in Australia and the remediation of the landscape to provide a buffer zone between the consolidated settlement and the desertification, salination and erosion that climate change is sure to bring.

4. Climate systems are not behaving as many people would believe them to. Instead of global warming meaning that average temperatures everywhere are rising, average temperatures are swinging to extremes. In Britain, extremely heavy snowfalls over December and January have brought transport networks to a standstill, including the Eurostar services under the English Channel, while in Australia, extreme weather has seen wholesale cancellations on Melbourne’s suburban network and shut down the Adelaide-Darwin railway line. Other weather extremes such as strong winds and heavy rain test the resiliance of transport networks across Australia and around the world. While governments make promises about measures to improve the resiliance of public transport networks and oppositions criticise them for not doing enough, others argue that the costs of preparing transport networks for extreme weather events that may occur relatively rarely (at least 1-in-20 year events) is not a good use of public money.

Yet, strategies to mitigate events that occur more regularly as the climate begins to ‘flicker’ between extreme highs and lows (such as heat related failures) probably are worth investing in. How then do we harden urban public transport networks against extreme weather events and how do we build in resilience in people and infrastructure to keep the network running? And how do we achieve this hardening and resiliance building without robbing urban public transport of funds for more immediate and pressing matters like addressing long-term maintenance backlogs, ordering new vehicles and extensions to the network?

So there you have it. Four thoughts to ponder in the New Year. I hope this provokes some good responses (I’m sure that it will).

It’s a tradition in the British Parliament that during the Summer recess, the deeper thinkers in some of the political parties compile a Summer reading list for MPs to read. I must also admit that in writing this post I was inspired by Riccardo’s post on his blog about his wish that the young gunzels would head down to the libraries to round out their railway education with something broader and deeper than what Railpage has to offer.

With the end of the academic year in sight, the last exam taken care of and as with work year starting to run down, the long, glorious sunlit uplands of Christmas, New Year and summer beckons and it’s a good time to dust books off hiding in the unread pile and get ready to read them.

Thus, I’ve set up a summer reading list of transport- and urban planning related reading that may broaden the mind of Transport Textbook readers during the Summer. While I’ve read many of them and own quite a few as well, there’s some I haven’t yet read and some I want to read.

The 20 books I’ve listed are an eclectic mix of new and old, ’straight’ railway history and more nuanced historical studies of railways, not to mention the urban planning stuff which deals with the rest of the world beyond the railway boundary. If you don’t have these books at home, or can’t find them at your local library, there are many places to buy them online second hand at a reasonable price. Of course, comments, amendments and suggestions to the list are always welcome. Read on!

1. Robert Lee, Fruits of federation : the Grafton-Brisbane uniform gauge railway and Clarence River Bridge

2. Matthew Engel, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain

3. Paul Mees, A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City

4. Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie The Railway Station: A Social History

5. Ian Manning, The Open Street: public transport, motor cars and politics in Australian cities

6.Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities

7. Peter Hall, Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design in the 20th Century

8. Mark Bachels, Philip Laird and Peter Newman, Back on track: rethinking transport policy in Australia and New Zealand

9. Eric Harding, Uniform Railway Gauge

10. Bill Hosokawa, Old Man Thunder: Father of the Bullet Train

11. G. H. Fearnside All Stations West: the story of the Sydney-Perth standard gauge railway

12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch The railway journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century

13. Geoffrey Churchman Railway Electrification in Australia and New Zealand

14. John Gunn Along Parallel Lines: a history of the railways of New South Wales

15. David Burke Road through the Wilderness: the story of the transcontinental railway

16. Clive Forster Australian Cities: Continuity and Change

17. Kevin O’Connor, Robert Stimson and Maurie Daly Australia’s changing economic geography: A society divided

18. Brendan Gleeson Australian heartlands: Making space for hope in the suburbs

19. Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low Australian urban planning: new challenges, new agendas

20. John Kerr Triumph of narrow gauge : a history of Queensland Railways

The 2010 Australasian Transport Research Forum has put out a call for papers that closes at the end of January 2010. It will be held in Canberra, so it’s a good opportunity to go to a local conference on transport that’s not too expensive.

If you’ve got a piece of research that you’ve done on a transport topic, why not share it with the rest of the transport world? Just finished an honours/masters/PhD? – time to publicise your research. Alternatively, if you’ve just completed a transport project, it’s time to share successes and failures with your peers.

I know there’s a few contributors who already work in the industry who could easily do a paper and there are others who have lots of good ideas, but no ’serious’ forum (beyond TT of course) at which to be heard. Then its time to ‘put the money where the mouth is’ so to speak. A 200-word abstract is not a big investment of one’s time. The hard part will be putting the paper together if it gets accepted.

If anyone is interested in taking the first step into a wider world of transport research and policy, email me and I’d be pleased to lend a hand and give advice. For examples of what an ATRF paper looks like, there’s a great archive of papers from the first conference in 1975 through to 2009 on the PATREC website. There are so many good ideas floating around on TT that it would be a shame if they went no further out into the world of transport.

Operation Phoenix

As a historian by training, I was inspired by this thread at the Other Place to think about some counter-factual transport history scenarios in Australia. 

In general, the counterfactual history is interested in the incident or event that is being negated by the counterfactual, and seeks to evaluate the importance of that incident or event by refracting it through the lens of the counterfactual. The counterfactual historian attempts to provide reasoned arguments for each divergence from the factual, with changes outlined usually in broad terms, since the results of the counterfactual are effects rather than causes. The counter-factual historian’s narrative is also limited to exploring a single effect or set of effects from a particular incident or event occurring differently, as to regress or extrapolate further from the original incident enters the realms of alternate history.

On the other hand, alternate history writers are interested precisely in the hypothetical scenarios or narrative that flows from the divergent incident or event. Alternate history writers are therefore free to invent very specific events and characters in the imagined history, much as fiction writers do.

Of course, like all things in life there are good and bad counter-factual histories. Among the best are volumes such as this, this and this which promote different ways of thinking about a given historical problem or paradigm. However, there needs to be some intellectual rigour applied to the historical counter-factual, lest it (using the example from the Other Place about Operation Phoenix) degenerate into a foamy festival about how many more steam locomotives could the VR have ordered or how much better the L class would have looked with a rounded nose.

This rivet counting counter-factual ‘history’ is perhaps (as eminent British historian E. H. Carr would have it) more of a “parlour game” than historical analysis and as such more correctly consigned to the bargain bin of ‘alternate history’. This is the home of the modern equivalent of the ‘penny dreadful’ mystery or ‘pulp’ sci-fi novel, typified by the alternate history/war porn of the prolific Harry Turtledove and John Birmingham.  These works tend to stress the operational and tactical level of history with emphasis on hardware, battles and character-driven scenarios, rather than the unseen, hidden actors of history and the storylines behind what the French <i>Annales</i> school of historians called ‘the <i>longue duree</i>’ of history that stresses the evolution of structures of institutions and governance over time rather than individual men and machines.

Therefore my point (and I do have one!) is that counter-factual histories allow us to examine a particular event and the implications of that event having ‘gone the other way’.

Thus, in some research I’m doing at the moment, I’m looking at how the push to bring give the federal parliament strong powers to control the national railway network, to undertake gauge standardisation and build ’national’ railway lines (by representatives from South Australia in particular) at the Australian Federal Conventions of 1891 and 1897-8 were voted down by delegates focused on preserving states’ rights, giving a federal government strong powers to make interstate trade ‘totally free’ (thus solving the predatory ’rate wars’ on the colonial railways – especially between NSW and Victoria). The end result was the weak powers in S. 51 of the Constitution giving federal governments control of railways for military purposes and to only acquire and build railways with the consent of the states. In this context, I am interested in how the enacting of a different form of federalism by the founders of Australia would have had different results on the following century of Australian railways.

Some other rail transport ‘what ifs’ worth pondering:

• What if Labor had won the 1949 Federal election? Would some of the US$250 million loan from the World Bank that was approved the following year (sponsored by the Truman Administration for Australia’s support of US foreign policy) have been spent by the Commonwealth on (among other things) the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (the historical result) or alternatively on furthering Harold Clapp’s gauge standardisation scheme, or something else altogether? 
• What if the Federal Cabinet in 1991 had decided to grant tax concessions on infrastructure investment? Would this have enabled the construction of a Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne high speed rail link to go ahead? Would this hole in the Federal Budget (estimated at the time to be up to $1.4 billion) have effectively killed off the Building Better Cities and One Nation infrastructure investment programs ($816 million and $454 million respectively)?
• What if the Railway Agreement (Queensland) Act, 1961 had a clause on gauge standardisation included as a condition of Commonwealth funding of an upgrade of the Collinsville-Townsville-Mt Isa line? What would this have meant to the ’splendid isolation’ of the Queensland rail system on narrow gauge into the 1970s and beyond as the haulage of export coal became big business? Would it have led to a Pilbara-style heavy-haul standard gauge railway built to US standards?
• What if the Victorian Railways’ Operation Phoenix had have been overseen by an American railway executive (such as the ones who’d been out here in US military uniform during the war) than the Chief Executive of British Railways? Would the Americans have advocated a rehabilitation solution involving diesel-electric locomotives, steel-bodied bogie rolling stock and infrastructure upgrades on key rail corridors instead of locking into a technological dead-end of steam power and 4-wheel wagons that would be obsolete when they were delivered?

So as you can see from these fairly simple examples, counter-factual histories are not hard to think up, it’s marshalling the evidence to make them stand up to scrutiny that’s the hard bit without finding ‘correlations without causation’.

I am sure that other readers and contributors can think of some other ‘what ifs’ worthy of further study.

There has been much fretting at in the NSW Government over the future of Town Hall station, so much so that it has been a key factor in the plan for the Rozelle Metro, and in previous proposals such as the Metro-West line from Central to Wynyard not via Town Hall.

The situation arises from Town Hall being Sydney’s most popular station, yet confined to a small station box with 6 running lines and platforms. The station is also situated over 3 underground levels – concourse and two rail levels, as well as an extensive  network of pedestrian tunnels and retail space running north, south and west from the station.

Since the Kings Cross (UK) underground fire, there has been heightened awareness of the dangers of a major public emergency underground. But every day there is also the very real risk of too many people being pushed into the very confined platform space, and no natural way of preventing overloading, which could conceivably result in people being pushed onto the tracks.

Some technologies that might assist include platform screen doors (doors at the platform edge that align with the doors on the train, and remain closed until a train is present with its doors open), station screen doors, and doors to stop people entering the entire underground complex.

Platform screen doors have not been used as far as I’m aware without some onboard system for the driver to accurately stop the train (so no, we won’t be seeing them on Melbourne’s Siemens lines) and there would be too many entrances to the entire underground complex. Perhaps a set of station doors would do the trick. This is used at Lo Wu in HK and is common on mainland Chinese railways, where the aim is to keep people away from the platform until the train has arrived.

Capital works that might make a difference include enlarging the box (which apart from the immense cost, is doubly challenged as the combination of island platforms on four lines and single platforms but with their back to the island, provides no obvious platform configuration that would provide additional space), adding many more escalators, increasing train frequency (to clear people from the station quicker) or a “Metro West” style proposal to build a bypass tunnel, and simply close one track pair through TH to reduce the burden on the existing station.

There might be the option to have

Plausibly the Rozelle Metro, by having its platforms outside the existing box, might reduce crowding of people at the current Town Hall station. However, as it is marketed currently as being highly connective with the Cityrail system AND is likely to lead to a resurgence in rail travel – might simply make the whole thing worse.

And Museum station, not 400 metres away to the East – could it be part of the solution, for example, by closing the City Circle platforms at Town Hall and directing custom from that area towards Museum and St James instead, for example, by building a south-eastern passageway network. That way, intending passengers from Pitt St and east, and particularly south of Bathurst St will find Museum and St James more convenient.

What do readers think are the solutions in the Town Hall (and Wynyard to a lesser extent) cases?

See related article about North Sydney.

As some of you may know, I have been running an experiment for the last ten years – is it possible for a person to live a “normal” life without using a car? To this end I have deliberately not taken driving lessons (although I did obtain a learner’s permit, to be a form of ID because everyone asks for a driver’s licence when they just mean photo ID).

However, recently I have been forced to obtain private transport due to living where there is no public transport after 9pm – and needing to work five days a week until 10pm. Rest assured, this private transport is in the form of a bike with electric booster, I have not bowed under pressure and bought a car.

Even so, it has been very instructive for me. I have found that private transport gives options that public transport doesn’t. Everything I have learned will have to be learned by people who mode-shift from private to public transport – but they will have to learn it the opposite way, things will get harder instead of easier.

A few examples. Probably the most obvious is travel time. Travelling on the bike means I can get up five minutes later and still get to work on time. Actually my daily commute was a single bus with minimal walking at each end, the only reason the bike is faster is because Route 733 diverts into Monash Uni instead of barrelling straight along Clayton Road like I can on the bike. Most other commuters would have a much bigger time difference than five minutes. To achieve successful modal shift, people will have to accept that travel will take longer.

A related one is granularity of travel options. Previously, I knew that if I was to get to work on time I had to catch the 6:36am bus. If I didn’t walk out the front door at 6:34 I would miss it, and the next available bus would get me to work at least 15 minutes late. So I had to set the alarm on my phone – and if I hadn’t finished breakfast by Time To Go, bad luck, better get up on time tomorrow. Whereas with private transport, if I delay by one minute I can just pedal a bit harder, run a few red lights, and still get to work on time. Of course that encourages bad habits among private transport commuters (eg turning one minute into ten and being late despite running not just one red light but all of them) – but Australian society has never worried about creating bad habits if it makes things easier. To achieve successful modal shift, people will have to learn the concept of rigid time cutoffs.

A third aspect of public transport which I’ve had to un-learn is the importance of taking everything with you. This is more obvious with cars than bikes of course – you can just leave things in the car that you might need at work or might not. Park the car, go in. Damn, I need a bottle of dry lubricant. No problem, it’s in the tool box in the car. People who travel on public transport have to carry everything with them, so anything they didn’t plan to use at work they leave home. Even a large backpack won’t carry everything that “might be useful”. To achieve successful modal shift, people will have to learn to expect the unexpected.

Of course there are a large number of holes in our public transport system – areas not served, areas only served during limited hours, areas only served by badly designed routes that are a nightmare to use, etc. As I said above, it was the problem of insufficient service persistence that forced me to opt for private transport. To achieve successful modal shift, people will have to organize their travel needs around routes and timetables.

Some of those problems can be fixed. Others can’t. But together, they make public transport an unattractive option for people accustomed to the convenience of using their own car. If we can fix the problems that are fixable, either the budgetry or environmental advantages of commuting by public transport might balance the rest and bring on a modal shift.