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

Let’s talk lifestyle everyone. What do people do these days? Are they likely to need transport on a Sunday as on a Saturday? Perhaps industrial agreements are still relevant, perhaps not. Perhaps religion is, perhaps not. Views, anyone?

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting plan from Garry Glazebrook to spend up big on Sydney urban transport. Well maybe not that interesting as it simply restates a lot of existing proposals and says just do them Nike-style. What caught my eye is that again big urban transport plans are in vogue.

While Russ, Lachie and others are around who can make for good conversation on the interactions of government and urban transport, I’d go beyond a discussion of the legalist approach to government intervention and look at the political approach to government intervention in the transport market.

I’ll put some propositions out and see where they lead.

First, Australians have never been shy of regulation or government intervention. At the macro level, we have been keen to impose tariffs and wage increases to regulate the economy as a whole, and a hefty tax impost to support this intervention and also equalise incomes more than they might otherwise be.

There is therefore no inherent reason why transport markets have not been able to be up- or down-regulated according to government or political whim. Lack of intervention has never been sacrosanct (like HK to a certain extent) or mandated by underlying ideology (the socialist countries).

Second, there has always been a market for urban transport. The intervention that has taken place has always been to alter the outcomes, not to create a market that otherwise didn’t exist (market development). You could contrast this with say tertiary education or the solar energy production market.

Those outcomes that were sought to be substantially altered by government intervention were:

-the improve the poor viability of urban transport fixed route operators (rail and route bus) against non-fixed  route operators (jitney type bus services) that have been around since the year dot but only disappeared when private motor transport made their market unviable. This was to produce stability in consistency in the urban transport product and also promote investment into the market to reduce costs.

-to reduce congestion on roads, with limited effect

-to achieve certain social and economic welfare goals, unrelated to the efficient transport objective.

Third, there have always been interest groups involved in pushing intervention on the transport market, but only in recent years have interest groups been representative of the consumer in the transport market, and these representations have been largely ineffective. Even the most significant players, the motoring clubs, at best pressure governments on dangerous traffic spots, not on whole of metropolis sized changes. The extent to which representative government, often called democracy, represents the urban transport consumer, is limited by the other calls on representative government. The other interest groups – unions primarily, but also operators and manufacturers have been very narrow and self-centred in their outlooks, possibly to the point of cutting their own throats by substituting short term considerations for long.

Fourth, while a two party system with a substantial permanent bureaucracy moves towards a dynamic of incrementalism rather than radical change – transport more than any other aspect of economic life benefits from radical changes, and more so as the backlog of work increases. This is because of certain aspects inherent in transport, such as network effects, the way transport is valued by the market (as a complimentary good, rarely consumed for its own sake) and the potential for small market failures such as congestion to be multiplied significantly through the economy.

Fifth, and contrary to widely held belief, there has been no significant successes of a road lobby in urban transport – population for population, area for area, motorway construction has been very limited in Australia and for most cities the backbone of a network has only just been completed, and in the case of Adelaide, not even started.

Another meme that does the rounds is that environmental lobbying has been successful in shutting down motorway construction since the early to mid 1970s but even then it would be paradoxical that the other half of this demand – that the money be spent on public transport – was not followed.

The only reason we can see this effect more clearly in the rest of the world, noteably the USA, is because their freeway networks were largely complete by that time. And the freeway networks were more substantial even then – with more lanes, larger and more sophisticated interchanges and more cross-town or non-radial routes. And while environmentalists have not got all they wanted, it marked a shift in places as diverse as Dallas and San Diego towards rail transport – a shift we never saw in Australia.

The 1970s in Australia was only characterised by the completion of some very long overhang projects such as the Eastern Suburbs Railway, CIty Loop and Brisbane electrification, some minor route extensions no different from other decades such as Werribee or Noarlunga, and no reduction in the threat level to the Perth system, the closure of Hobart rail and continued third world standards in places like Newcastle and Wollongong. Buses continued on the patterns of decades and vehicles were generally very old.

So does interest group politics play any real role in urban transport planning and development?

Could it be the non-transport interest groups that make more of a difference? The health and education lobbies, for example. It’s true that Australian health outcomes are excellent, second only to Japan and this has been achieved in a genuine mixed (public and private) system rather than a mostly public system like the UK, or a mostly private system like the US. Health share of GDP is medium to good for the field. Education, despite the gripes, is also well catered for, with cultural rather than funding issues likely to be the main driver of inadequate performance. Tertiary education also sits in a unique position of being too dependent on short term funding streams such as student fees and less on a long term market position, such as philanthropy, private research funding and so on. The product is also poorly valued in the market place, possibly reflecting its poor contribution to human capital. A topic for another day!

Have these two fields profited at the expense of urban transport? It’s hard to see how. The UK’s health system has been a considerable draw on the public purse yet the budget also supports the London Underground, the urban motorways and the submarine-launched strategic nuclear arsenal. So it isn’t like having substantial government spending on health comes at the cost of transport. Japan has hospital lengths of stay twice what they are in Australia – again, you can’t see their rail system suffering for it. Nor Japan’s extensive public education or university systems.

Does defence draw too much from the economy to afford decent urban transport? Given that the defence share of GDP in Australia has fallen and is now less than 2%, low by the standards of other, I seriously doubt it. The ‘consumer’ lobbies for defence are usually current and retired servicemen and women, who tend to have a more active interest in the national defence, a few academics and not many others. However, the services themselves tend to be strong advocates of their own cause, unlike the transport industry. So while share is low, funding can be directed to current causes and perceived threats, whether it be peacekeeping, terrorism or conventional warfare. Transport cannot so flexibly move people and assets around.

Ignoring other more minor players, this leaves only one potential culprit in the lobbying game – and that’s the welfare lobby. Their retail arms are organisations such as the pensioners and superannuants, the councils of social services and their many other guises. But are they effective?

Australian share of GDP spent on welfare is high but not alarmingly so – we can all point to systems that are more redistributive and generous. Sweden’s famously generous system has not cost the Stockholm Tunnelbana or the X2000 program. Of course they pay more tax but that is a choice we could also make.

I will not count the Taxpayers Association and interests representing more free market economics as offering anything to the transport issue for one reason – that is my original premise, which is that if the government were to intervene, it is to alter a private market outcome, which implies there is one. If the government were to retreat from this space, then the private market would reassert itself. However, apart from a few high profile gestures in the media, we have not actually seen this. I’m interested in the total pot of money to be spent on transport, not who spends it.

So where’s the money, Ralph? Has the transport money disappeared, or is it there, but being spent ineffectively?

Coming back to the Glazebrook plan, or any of these other multibillion dollar plans, all of which have both an internal sense of logic and an external sense of fantasy, the question is whether Australia could be put on a vector of continuous radical improvement to transport, whether it be a big motorway network (which the roads agencies are still pushing, in different language) or a big fixed rail and bus network (everyone else) would make the deal. I hear a lot of rain on the roof, but I don’t see much water dripping through.

I will reveal, if I haven’t already, that my fundamental ideological underpinning for viewing society is still fundamentally marxian even if in economic terms I tend to favour markets for efficiency reasons.

First, the powerful will always look after themselves (as Menzies said!) We should not confuse them with the rich, even though they are usually that too. I recall one of those HK triad films where the gangsters go to Taiwan to pay off some politician for some shady deal. The gangsters make the point of showing off how rich they are, until the politician puts them down and points out that as an elected official, he has more power than they ever will, in their semidictatorship of British and then Beijing rule.

Secondly the middle class really are suckers – they let the abstract thinking they are taught in secondary and tertiary education get them trapped doing the dirty work of the powerful. Yet not quite well enough to outplay the powerful at their own game. They do the accounting, the lawyering, the entertainment and the execution of power by the powerful, but get paid from the petty cash tins of the powerful. Then they end up paying all the tax, struggling with the trains to work, sending their kids to expensive schools so they can perpetuate the cycle rather than breaking from it.

And as the recent unedifying debates about cash-splashes, pension ages, first home grants and baby bonuses shows, they end up begging the powerful for relief from the very monster they created. Let’s be entirely clear – the middle class massively outnumber the powerful yet do not use democracy to achieve power over the powerful.

As Ayn Rand fantasised, the powerful always dream of retaliation, capital strikes and fleeing overseas, but we do not see this in reality. Even Cuba’s expatriate lobby did not break Castro, if anything, they kept him in power by making him, rather than economic management, the issue. A minority of HK’s elite left ahead of the Chinese handover yet arguably those who stayed have done better from it.

The powerful will never see urban transport as an issue – except in so far as it makes them more money and power. We are starting to see this – the property councils and big developers are starting to make real noises about the need for urban transport – it is costing them too much without it. At the end of the day cities have always had a power elite but without the city there is no power to be elite over.

The USA has had more options for the power elite to keep power, with a more decentralised population (it didn’t matter if you ignored a city of 1 million, if you had 100 cities of 20,000 on your side) and power bases outside commerce, such as agriculture or the military. Australia definitely lacked both these conditions so at the end of the day, you have to have a city to have power, and with poor transport you run the danger of not having a city.

I suspect the Australian political system has got away with ignoring transport for the following reasons: – the elite themselves until haven’t had a problem, and I suspect the drive from Toorak or Double Bay hasn’t changed much over the years. And it doesn’t matter the political colour, the ALP have been all the more undignified in their race to the feeding trough than you might have expected the Libs to be.

Second, distance from the real world – the 20 hour flight lets you think that you’re transitioning from one state of mind to another, not connecting the real world issues in Australia with those elsewhere. We make mental ‘allowances’ for Australia’s ‘differences’ that are patently unreasonable. Not reasonable in Kansas, or Finland, or Hokkaido, all places with relatively low population densities and vastly different cultures from each other, yet all of which handle the transport question with more gusto than we do.

And even the Kansas politician with his bible, his gun and his low taxes will not tell you transport doesn’t matter, that they don’t vote for it or it is only the concern of marginal groups. He might tell you its for the private sector to pay, but not that no-one should pay. And if he loses that argument and the citizens of Kansas vote for a light rail system, they’ll get a nice new one, off the shelf, road-tested by the citizens of Finland or Hokkaido and as effective as it can be in the circumstances. You might then find Kansas with an excellent, if congested, urban road system and a boutique light rail system catering to another clientele. No doubt the light rail will never be quite enough, but you’ll know Kansas is on the right track.

I look at the window where I’m sitting right now, and I don’t think we’re in Kansas.

Some basic assumptions

The idea that Melburnians are wedded to their cars implies that public transport use is not a function of public transport quality – if it were then it would be a good indication that people were making transport decisions based on the merits of their options. To test this, we can compare public transport modal share and average cars per household in parts of the city with good and bad public transport quality. To assess what constitutes a good public transport service, I’m going to take a very simple approach – namely that trams and trains are good, and that buses are bad. It’s certainly a simplistic assumption, but a largely necessary one if I’m to use the map data. In any case, I think it’s fair to say that, on average, the quality of service on Melbourne trains and trams is much higher than on buses.

The data

The data I’ve used is from the ABS’ Melbourne… A Social Atlas and DPCD’s Melbourne Atlas, both from 2006.

The map below is from pages 50-51 of the ABS report, and details public transport modal share for trips to work. Using trips to work (which are primarily undertaken at peak hours) works well because it is when the trains are at their most efficient and the cars their least efficient.

What’s striking about the map is how clearly the areas of higher public transport use in the middle and outer suburbs are clustered around the rail lines. The inner suburbs are largely saturated with tram lines and also have a high public transport modal share.

The next map is more interesting. Taken the DPCD’s Melbourne Atlas Living in Melbourne section, it shows the relative proportions of 0, 1, 2 and 3 car households in Melbourne.

There’s a clear pattern of cars with fewer cars clustering around the rail lines, and I’d say that in general, fewer cars equates to more public transport use. These figures are going to be influenced by average occupancies per dwelling and overall density. Pages 64-65 of the ABS report shows the percentage of the population living alone, which is clustered around rail lines in some areas, but the connection does not appear to be incredibly strong. Population density (pages 12-13 of the ABS report) does not seem to be correlated with the rail corridors at all.

Conclusion and caveats

To my mind, the data shown above suggests that Melburnians do make their transport decisions on the basis of the available options. The obvious issue with my assessment is the selection bias problem. It could well be argued those that want to use PT will choose to live close to rail and tram lines, and that those who prefer to drive won’t care if they live near PT. I don’t find that argument very convincing, but in all fairness I have to admit that the data above can’t rule it out. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this issue.

cheers

Phin

A very respectable load of passengers – in both senses.
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I’m writing this from onboard the capital connection from Palmerston North to Wellington. The time is 6:25 and we have just cleared the end of the wire. The sun is not yet risen and only a dull twilight glows on the cloudy horizon. Most outside is silhouette.

The train is excellent. It still betrays its British feeling. The seats scream ‘business’ in their leather in somber colours, and the tables between the pairs of facing seats scream ‘professional’. And the pair of automatic doors to the vestibule, hissing quietly when they open and sealing perfectly tight, scream ‘European’ as do the plug doors outside. I still preferred the Masterton set, more welcoming colours and the same internal fit out.

The train has built up a fair bit of speed and the locomotive is managing the 8 cars well. Not that many on board, maybe this will change as we hit the other towns. Sheep everywhere! Some might say ‘of course’ The river bridges are longer than those in southern Australia are used to, more reminiscent of Queensland, except of course for the cold, even in mid February.

The crowd will hopefully build up, so this train can pay its way. It is understood that this is a full-cost-recovery train, not subsidised by the local councils the way the urban services are. At $21, I still feel it is reasonably priced, and the crowd betrays the sort of market the train would appeal to – professionals from Palmerston North needing a day in Wellington. We are yet to hit the genuine commuter area.

The bizarre thing is, Wellington Regional Council is funding the extension of the wires to Waikanae, a town that currently rates only one stop a day on this Palmerston North service. This full cost recovery service. Nothing intermediate, not like say, Pukekohe in Auckland which has gone from having one single run of the Silver Fern cars out from Auckland in peak time, to having a few such services (five or six each peak), a base from which to build. A leap of faith, I would suggest, in the Waikanae case. Build it and they will come.

Until those wires arrive, this train will be the sole stopping train at this and other locations between Palmerston North and the wire at Paraparaumu.

The daylight is now beginning to emerge. We are travelling fairly fast through small villages that don’t warrant the train stopping. One we just passed would have scored a Vline stop. Why can’t Vline be this professional? Charge the sort of fares that merit a better class of people. Run cars that these people deserve. And only stop to collect people at places that merit a stop – that merit delaying the passengers already on board.

Is it worth running only one train a day? To a city of nearly100,000 people? Well it isn’t the only form of public transport, with an interurban standard frequency between Wellington and Palmerston North via the intercity buses, also run to recover costs. And there is the Overlander train, running the daylight service, out of Wellington at 7:25 in the morning, and running from Palmerston North in the afternoon to reach Wellington in the early evening. This is ‘cost recovery’ transport, provided to a proven market. $22 each way from Palmerston North to Wellington. The bus is cheaper, but then, that’s the bus. Not the onboard comfort. That’s lesson 2: each improvement in comfort should be charged for. Not ridiculously so, but modestly.

Business-standard seating – beats Vline or the V-set

Daylight is well and truly up as we speed further south. Cows now alternate with sheep. Low cloud hangs above the hills to our left. We seem to be slowing, on the outskirts of a town. A passing loop emerges on the right-side window. Not much remains of the customary yard and sidings, long gone. Many New Zealand platforms are simple flat affairs accessing directly to the street, maybe with a simple building, Trafalgar/Yarragon style, right in the middle of town. This one is called Shannon. Not much stirring in the town this early and only a couple of passengers waiting.

The train moves off promptly. The signalling system looks suitably automatic and no hint of the last of the semaphore signalling that lingered too long in Australia. Concrete sleepers are in evidence, they look like they’ve been around longer but not the significant continuous blocks of them now found in Australia after mass upgrades. The cloud is lifting from the ranges. Mountain ridge lines are much more jagged than you see in Australia. The flats and plains look very green but the mountain sides still l look quite dry.

In many places it is easy to be tricked by the low embankments – they have the look of abandoned rail corridors, but actually line irrigation channels or serve as farm driveways. I don’t have my NZ rail map with me (actually the last one I had I through out) so I don’t know much of the history of this area. We are just running through another loop with a few sand-covered sidings, not slowing for it. No sign of a freight wagons. I think freight is the same deal as in Australia – containers and bulk only. Some categories we don’t do now, milk for example.

The ride from these cars is satisfactory, slightly rough track although this is providing the illusion of speed. We’ve slowed for a curve. Not much of this in evidence so far and we haven’t copped the reverse curvature that NSW and Queensland are famous for. The line is single track until after, on, Paraparaumu. The only block of significant double track is at the Auckland to Hamilton end. We are passing more villages that don’t merit a stop.

We are entering town called Levin, from the roadside signage, I know we have a stop here. We’ve passed a suburban platform but we will only make one stop, at the main station. Not like Masterton, a town with several ’suburban’ platforms that are stopped at. Levin yard looks empty. Many, many people t getting on, maybe 50 or so. Lucky we have 8 cars! The station building is lit and open, and looks inviting, unlike Palmerston North earlier today. Of course, no need to go into PN station building, as the train was open and lit when I arrived, 20 minutes before departure.

Off again after creeping past the station cafe, with its train paintings inside. For another time perhaps. Some unused private sidings off to the left. Back up to speed as we leave Levin. Bit of bounce from the bogies beneath me, sort of rapid ‘chopping’ action. Passengers move through the train, clearly looking for better seats than what they found where they boarded at Levin.

My ticket sits on the table in front of me. The conductor likes the tickets to be displayed on the tables so he doesn’t have to ask again. I like idea of conductors. Auckland and Wellington probably have too many per train, but with only one station, Papakura, actually staffed besides the main terminals, it is clear they can afford them. I suspect they need machines as well, so conductors can concentrate on checking. It’s good to see paper tickets again. None of the headlong rush into electronic systems that don’t work, as we’ve seen in Sydney and Melbourne.

The speed varies slightly from time to time but I haven’t seen any temporary speed restriction signs. We fly over bridges that have fast, clean water flowing beneath them. We travel alongside the main highway. A basic affair. The motorway section is very limited and near Wellington. We slow to go round a curve at some nameless town we are skipping. So far only two stops from Palmerston North. The speed does seem to slow for even the curve, and I can feel we are approaching a bridge, let’s see if it is the cause of the restriction. The Hutt River Bridge on the Masterton run suffers this – you get a close look at the bridge timber condition as the train slows to cross.

After several minutes of crawling through reverse curves and 50kms sign posts, we reach a substantial station at Otaki. Twenty or so wait to board. The station is closed up and covered in graffiti, a terrible shame after the earlier example at Levin. Maybe it is the townsfolk’s pride in Levin, and lack of same in Otaki. The train looks decently full now, and not a feral in site, men and women in suits. As long as one had a good job and an alternative way of getting home if the evening CC is missed, it looks like a great way to get to work.

We cross one of those long bridges across a wide, rocky but shallow river, like at Stratford on Avon, but which are otherwise rare in southern Australia. A result of NZ’s glaciation, and lack of that in Australia. Our speed has built back up well and we are overtaking traffic on the highway. Always a good sign and good marketing for rail. Hits motorists in their ‘I’m an individual’ nerve. Particularly as a few look like they are stuck behind trucks. They slow to enter Te Horo, we don’t, we continue at speed through this small town. If the traffic is doing 80km/h, their speed limit, we must be doing over 100. An achievement on conventional 1067mm track with conventional loco power up front. We’re giving a truck a run for its money, as it charges the hill.

The shoe is now on the other foot, we slow while the traffic marches on. The nearby hills are unexpectedly steep and tall this close to the line. NZ certainly at is best ‘Lord of the Rings’ look. We’ve gained on that traffic again as we race through Peka Peka. There is something to be said for not stopping at every little town, as Vline does at Riddles Creek or Cityrail does north of Telerah. Although what Cityrail is actually doing north of Telarah is anyone’s guess.

No sign of Wellington’s suburbs yet. Wellington may be the capital but is still a small city. Newcastle sized, Hobart-styled with the prosperity of those on permanent incomes, like Canberra. The train service is better than Newcastle’s, and no-one is trying to toss rail out of the city centre to make money.

I’d like to imagine Newcastle had this type of rail service, to Sydney. Or even a similar arrangement for Singleton and Muswellbrook. No ferals. Decent train with paying pax. But would they want a day in Newcastle. What is there in Newcastle that is so compelling to do? Why not fly down to Sydney instead. This is Newcastle’s problem, not the train service, but the lack of reason for being. Newcastle has more in common with Palmerston North, the university city that feeds into Wellington, than it has with Wellington itself, though the sizes are similar.

We slow to a stop unexpectedly. A few people board at a small station in the middle of the town. This is Waikanae. It doesn’t look big enough for a suburban extension, though we are getting close to Wellington. Still very rural, and those high hills loom over the town. Plenty of cars in the station carpark, and about 30 people board. The 8 cars are still not challenged for seating room. Wellington Regional Council must have grand dreams for this town, as there doesn’t look like much demand yet for a full-time rail service. There must be some though; the suburban trains have been running to Paraparaumu for 25 years so they must know where the edge of the demand boundary is.

The gap in the electrification is perplexing. When Auckland goes 25kv, there will be 2 gaps. From Papakura to Hamilton, and from Palmerston North to Waikanae. All that engine changing, its a wonder the labour costs don’t pay for the wires in between, even if dual voltage would be required at the Wellington end.
In some ways I hope it doesn’t come. This diesel hauled service is miles better than the common suburban services here, and I wouldn’t wish the Sunbury problem on these people, who look like the train service is worth something to them.

We are clearly in suburbs now, and pass a 40km caution as we run behind suburban backyards. We’ve hit the end of the wire at Paraparaumu. It looks like a hundred or so wait to get on. Paying extra to board the comfortable train, while only a few board the suburban train in the dock platform opposite. The car I’m in looks pretty full. My count of the passengers having boarded so far doesn’t tally with how fully the train appears. We leave the suburban train waiting in the dock platform, maybe 10% full. That’s not bad for a terminus, but also tells me, if they keep running this train after the extension of the electrification, they may find the benefit of the wire diminished, as the ‘choice’ custom will opt for the better train.

I look at the other passengers’ tickets, displayed on the tables. Capital Connection – Wellington to Paraparaumu. You need to buy a special ticket for this train. You can’t just board with the local ticket. A sensible move. We’re barely keeping up with traffic beside the road. Cars are now slowing for roadworks, which I suspect are actually the embankment widening for the duplication of the rail track north of MacKays crossing, which is taking places with the extension of the wire. Track equipment and orange plastic are strewn along the track now, though no-one is at work. A second track has been inserted into a level crossing with no track yet joining it.

We are still in very rural surroundings, clearly NZ takes the Perth view, get the wire extensions out well before the housing arrives, not well after as in Melbourne. Stanchions are almost all made of wood, with a steel cross piece at the top. We pass a tourist locomotive depot and some car sidings as we slow through the substantial station, the former electric terminus at Paekakariki, the outside now very suburban and pressed up against the line. I can still see grass covered hills above the suburb, but not on the flat.

We are holding our speed as the train hits the coast. The characteristic sea cliffs falling to the sea, with the line tacked on precariously, emerges. A bit like the Illawarra, though lower down. It is pleasing to see the locomotive at the head of the train and hear its gurgle. Nothing beats loco-hauled trains for comfort. It’s the feeling of having no motors within the carriage, and of more even acceleration and deceleration than multiple units can achieve. And the cars look open and comfortable with no traction equipment on board.

Traffic on the parallel two land coast road has ground to a crawl, and we are overtaking them very well even on our own curvature. The line is rising above the coast, into the hills. I don’t envy the road commuters. We head into a tight bore, single-track tunnel, only to emerge to the same scenery. And again. And again. And one more time for good measure. I can see why the line was electrified. For freight, of course, but the grades and the tunnels would have tested the steam loco crews. We reemerge to the double track, and crawl around the curves past a 40km board to Muri, a simple and very rustic station, built of wood. Reminiscent of the likes of Dora Creek or Point Clare in the old days.

School children start to appear on the platforms we pass. They are always a good market for rail, and will appear on trains in the fringe urban areas well ahead of many commuters. It’s slow going through this part of Wellington. The rural hillsides have started appearing again, not much in the way of development. We pass the Overlander, heading north, only a few cars long and big contrast with this train. The Overlander was nearly canned, and was saved with an original deal to run it 3 days a week, now reinstated to 7 days a week. Perhaps demand is off the boil again. As Countrylink in Australia finds, it is one thing to get people on the train for 2 hour journeys, another to get them on the train for 12. And while the train from Palmerston North to Wellington is a good deal compared with flying, from Auckland it isn’t. Not only do flights take only 1 hour on this main route, tourist fares are excellent and often undercut the rail fare.

You can see with such sparse settlement along this line that the passenger service was built up from having an electrified section for freight. I doubt even in the 1940s much consideration would have been given to electrifying for passengers, even without the burden competition from road traffic, you would have had in those days. We creep along the sea again at Plimmerton, with a feeling very like Bombo. Too cold for swimming though! Plenty of yachts and cruisers in the harbour here. We are making good progress through the suburbs and though the speed isn’t high, the pace is consistent.

Suburbs extend across the bay from here and they look remote from rail, a bit like in Gosford. I wonder if they drive to these stations, or just keep going. We are passing Porirua, a major stop on this line. There are several places they start the suburban services from, Porirua, Plimmerton as well as Paraparaumu. A predilection for P’s! It ain’t Gosford though, or maybe what Gosford looked like 20 years ago. A few multistory apartments blocks, but not like Gosford yet. The platforms and the bus interchanges are very full. We are in the full thick of peak hour I’d say.

Public transport has strong support here, unlike Newcastle. I guess it has to do with the sense of economic security. Newcastle’s working class have lifted themselves a long way from the mining and steelworks days, and the car is the symbol of that. Wellingtonians on the other hand, are supported by government jobs in the CBD, and can live well remote from that in these remote valleys and coastlines, and travel to work by electric train. So population is a key determinant of public transport demand, but so is culture. We need to work on culture more.

We pass Tawa station, very quiet compared with the earlier ones, maybe a train ahs just gone. I’m guessing so as our train slams on its breaks, we may be close behind. AS we prepare to enter the long tunnels that mark our entry to Wellington proper, we won’t have to worry about stations, so we should find the train in front speeding up. We pass Takapu Road, the last of the stations, still pleasingly rural this close to Wellington, we slow round a curve. Many of these stations look substantial, but run down. Shame.

I can see why the Paraparaumu-ites pay the extra for the service. It really surpasses Vline standards, yet for a simple Pakenham style service. Which supports my views on Pakenham. A premium service really should be offered, using the Vline model, and charged accordingly. Those who wish to use the Connex service would also be catered for, albeit at a lower standard and cheaper price. This would accommodate demand for services for many years to come (and deal with the politics of the area).

My ear pressure builds as we speed into the long tunnels. NZ tunnels always amaze me. It is our dereliction that we have not built them too. Too many places need this sort of tunnel – Mt Kuring-Gai to Brooklyn, Waterfall to Thirroul, even north from Dora Creek would be my picks. Ardglen may finally be getting one. Toowoomba is on the plans, although how many decades into the future? We seem to be keeping speed up in here. Probably the fastest place on the line, although the noise and loss of visual sense might be playing tricks. We emerge over the motorway and quickly reenter the next one.

These tunnels cut into ranges that divide Wellington into discrete urban areas. Rail has an advantage over road – it goes very directly to these places. Without tunnels, you end up with the Johnsonville line situation, rail services that really only work to connect welfare customers. J’ville is not so much a problem, it has a loyal clientele who find the train convenient at that close distance. But imagine if that was the main line to Auckland still. It would be like…NSW!

We stop outside Kaiwharawhara presumably for a signal. The congestion as we approach the terminus is noticeable. They are building an extra track into the terminus from here. I have never understood why five tracks (Hutt Valley, NIMT and Johnsonville) fell to 2 right at the terminus. We are talking running lines, not track, as there are dozens of freight sidings and electric car sidings beside us. We’ve been given the road, and are moving at pace towards the terminus. People are starting to get up from their seats.

I’ll leave it here as it’s time to pack up and go. An excellent rail service, which would put most Australian ones to shame.

1. It provides adequate transport in the face of the impossibility of providing accommodation for private transport in the form of cars.

Cities all over the world are starting to realise that they can’t build their way out of congestion. As we have just seen with Eastlink, as soon as one major road project is built it causes heavy congestion at its endpoints and another major project is “needed”. It’s our old friend “induced demand” – an empty road means an easy trip, which prompts people to make trips they would not have otherwise made, increasing the workload of the transport network.

The difference in public transport is that induced demand causes empty seats to be filled, without degrading the efficiency of the network. In short: public transport is more efficient at carrying a near-capacity load than roads.

2. It reduces the environmental impact of the transport sector

The environmental benefits of moving trips from cars to public transport are fairly well known. There are also indirect benefits:

a) Allowing freight vehicles a clear run due to less congestion

b) reducing traffic noise

c) reducing the need for land to be dedicated to transport corridoors (because a public transport vehicle takes up less space per passenger than a private vehicle).

Note that bicycles, while a form of private transport, are environmentally cleaner than cars and there is no benefit to moving trips from bikes to PT.

3. It increases transport safety

a) Congested roads are more dangerous than uncongested ones

b) Public transport vehicle drivers are subject to more stringent licence testing and drug/alcohol limits than private vehicle drivers

c) Rail-based modes of transport are inherently safer than road-based

4. It increases social interaction

Although there are exceptions, when people have to coexist on a public transport vehicle, they are less likely to tolerate anti-social behaviour. Isolating people from each other in cars leads to expressions of selfishness such as road rage.

So Somebody – my efforts with Smart Passengers, and others’ efforts here, are not just “a pointless race to get people out of cars” because getting people out of cars is not a pointless thing to do.

Problem:
Transport planning in Victoria so far has largely been based on each different service being provided by one technology, for instance urban transit with trams, metro transport with electric trains and interurban transport with diesel trains.

On top of this, as Melbourne has expanded and the need for different services has arisen, the technology has been “stretched” to perform two roles, often with mixed success. The result is often a compromise which compares badly with networks elsewhere which focus on either one role or the other.

Solution:

1. The system should be untangled, with separate services dedicated to each role.
2. The service should be made independent of the technology – for instance, interurban electric trains and metro trams should be introduced wherever the local conditions make them more feasible than current practice
3. With some alterations, different services can be provided using the same technology in the same corridoor – for instance, rail lines can carry both metro and interurban trains if expanded to four tracks. However four platforms are an unnecessary waste except at metro-interurban interchange stations.
4. Passengers should realise that changing modes during a trip (eg from a metro to an interurban service) is vital in the provision of high quality public transport. High frequency will ensure it is not a disincentive to travel.