Like most degenerative diseases, the malaises that have affected Australian rail over our lifetimes, were present long before they become evident, and long before they ended up nearly killing the host.

I’ve been down this track before so I was going to look at specific trends in rail, and open discussion on these topics.

In previous posts here and elsewhere I’ve suggested that the legacy rail network, particularly in SE Australia, had its last serious bout of investment in the 1920s.

However we would be foolish to regard even this round as a proactive investment in Australia’s development. On the contrary, I would suggest it was reactive, in other words, the “body” of Australian rail politics had already had the ‘disease’ at the point when the first radical cures were being tested.

Economic advantage over the competition

Even the lightest laid, most insubstantial railways in Australia, be they the cane tramways or the pioneer branchlines of the larger gauges, had a capacity and transit time advantage over the nearest competition, namely horse-drawn wagons.

Along the coast, however, the advantage was less clear, as shipping could at least manage to hold its own in terms of carrying capacity, and was not far behind on transit times (an analogy for the situation today vis a vis road and rail?).

Hence the coastal rail networks were the last to be developed, with 3 conspicuous examples: A connection from the eastern states to Perth, contiguous rail to Cairns, and the coastal line from Melbourne to Sydney (never finished) and Sydney to Brisbane (only completed in 1930).

I should also mention the Murray River riverboat network, if only to mention it played a valuable role in establishing the idea of rural development and the development of agricultural commodities as opposed to merely agriculture for home consumption. However, the network was not extensive, was indirect and not very reliable.

For all the talk of nation building and the importance of a national rail network, I suspect economics drove this.

Back to the horse-drawn vehicles: A manifold improvement in productivity from rail haulage was evident from the first railway being built, and for established or viable settlements it made sense to pay for rail haulage or passage, no matter how high the fixed costs of the rail system. Rail systems were incredibly capital intensive and somewhat labour intensive as well, however, to run the same system, even if it were possible, using horses would have been much more intensive in both (if you regard horses as capital).

In this first phase, rail as a development option was really against the opportunity cost of not developing country at all. While a grazier might be able to graze extensively, or a quite specific mining project, say gold or copper, might be able to smelt on site and lift small amounts of finished product out by horse, the options for development and settlement of distant inland settlements were few without rail.

Given the opportunity cost of rail was undeveloped country, this could easily skew arguments towards rail development. And away from developing the rail well, given that even a poor quality line would make a significant difference to the economic prospects of fertile country.

However, by the 1920s, even a rudimentary motor vehicle-based alternative would be a real threat. Here, the economic advantage came not from capacity or transit time (roads were still poor), but from the blind-spots of rail: inflexibility of rail, and high fixed costs.

If anything, arguably, motor vehicles profited from the opposite characteristics of those that made rail great. Rail could carry a few hundred tonnes at a time, even on the lowest quality routes; rarely was that capacity needed in Australia except during harvests, and even then. Yet customers and later taxpayers were paying for that fixed, very high capacity the routes had. Transit time might be better, but gate-to-gate or gate-to-ship times might be better, simply for the lack of waiting and handling.

If you stand in the souvenir shop at Puffing Billy’s Belgrave Station, you will see something that gives much of the game away. A comment on a photograph from the heydey of narrow gauge shows the old goods shed at Belgrave. It notes that little freight was in fact shipped through Belgrave, even at the start. It just wasn’t worth unloading it from horse or truck onto a narrow gauge train for a few km, then transhipping to the broad gauge. Much easier to get the horse or truck down the hill to Fern Tree Gully, even if this had a longer transit time.

This would be the tale of much of Australian rail even by the 1920s.

I recall reading in the passenger market it was similar. The Newcastle Express was introduced in the 1920s to combat the same problem, with some effort put into reducing the journey time which had not been a priority before. The road journey was still 4 hours versus 2.5 on the train. However was this the real journey time? The train might be reliable and fast but how frequent compared with a car you drive yourself, and could leave anytime; or a bus that might need only 20 passengers to be a viable run?

It follows as well that as the road journey time decreased, you would expect efforts made to improve the rail time as well. This did not occur, and the time is approximately the same today, despite vast sums spent on electrification, concrete sleepering and heavier rail.

Despite Australia having a somewhat impressive growth rate since the start of Australian rail, in practice it was nowhere near enough to soak up all the excess capacity of the rail system where it ran. And the question of spending recurrent resources maintaining this capacity, rather than a simultaneous rationalising and improvement, has dogged Australian rail since that time.

Technology

This flowed through into the technological choices. Assuming abundant capital and a viable market, one would assume Australia would at least be in the middle of the pack of technological innovation. And where the returns from innovation were high, in cases where Australia’s situation was special, you would expect to see Australia at the front. Situations like remoteness, like high temperatures, or low water availability, long distances to depots, and so on.

So it is a surprise to see it took an American to come in to shake up the South Australian Railways out of their Britishness, and that the neighbouring systems paid scant attention to what he was doing, though the lessons were much the same for them.

Physical token-based safeworking would be the first bizarre import from the UK that should not have persisted past the development of an alternative. Of course there were doubts about telegraphic and virtual systems such as train orders; why these weren’t traded off against the clear savings from significantly less staff and capital, and more flexibility, is not clear. Too many ‘purists’ with a UK history of safeworking I suspect.

Electrification on the DC system was also a technology just starting to come into its own when two Australian cities grasped it. It wasn’t actually a brand new technology, given trams and interurbans had been using a lighter version of the technology for some time. In fact, when Doncaster had Australia’s first electric tramway, it preceded Melbourne heavy rail efforts by decades.

This was a truly expensive technology, though it also realised significant benefits in crewing and servicing costs of locomotives. Especially in the busier or steeper parts of the system where steam costs were high. It is puzzling why, given these advantages, it wasn’t more widely used, especially before the advent of heavier haul diesel locomotives. I would guess the recurrent costs of the less profitable and more sparsely used parts of the system were diverting capital from what could have been a good system on the major routes.

Referring to the Newcastle Express above, one could imagine a lighter, faster and more sprightly electric service that could have been built in the 1920s, using similar car bodies as the suburban system but fitted out to a higher standard. Such cars could have put on the power on the grades the locomotives found tough, such as Cowan Bank, Hawkmount, and the Hornsby climb, and might have been cleared for faster running around curves. That alone would have cut some time from the timetable of the day, before any consideration was given to rerouting the corridor.

While internal combustion locomotion was still in its early days, railmotors had started appearing around the country on passenger traffic, most conspicuously through the Brills, CPH and PERM (later DERM).

Again, this should have been seen as a canary dozing off in the coalmine, as steam-hauled passenger trains were obviously quite unviable by the 1920s on all but the major routes. If a complete train of passenger cars could be replaced by a single self-propelled carriage, this was clearly pointing to the unviability of passenger traffic in rural areas on the whole. Now I don’t mean could they fill a train, as there will still large numbers of well patronised mail and day express trains on the major routes. I mean could they fill a train at an adequate rate of return, and to every nook and cranny of the system.

Oddly enough, some of these railmotors also started appearing on outer suburban routes, such was their lower cost, their convenience, and the actual traffic on offer. It is a wonder such vehicles weren’t considered for the marginal outer suburban lines of the day, like Lilydale, Hurstbridge, or the North Shore. As I understand it, they did actually see service to East Hills, Carlingford and the Sefton route.

If the 1850s revealled the promise of opening up the country with conveying heavy loads in reasonable times, the 1920s heralded the need for economy, the productivity curve tapering off massively.

Industrial Relations

The Australian Settlement, taken from the point of the Harvester Judgement, was a bit over a decade old at this point. In return for paying a fair wage, businesses exposed to import competition would be protected by tariffs. As this would hurt the domestic and export sectors, agriculture would be supported through marketing boards and export facilitation. Large numbers of monopolies were under government control, from water and electricity to the railways.

In the Anglosphere this was not yet the norm. The heydey of the private railway groups in the UK was coming upon them, while major railroad groups were forming in the US. Those nations too, apart from some cherry picking in specific industries like ship building, tended to less government intervention.

Given the explicit development objectives of Australian governments, it is not surprising that Australian rail operations had fallen so completely under government by this point. While the objective of maintaining the rail enterprise as a whole as a profitable or at least cost-neutral endeavour remained, differentials of profitability within the enterprise remained.

Fare and freight rates books tended to be fairly even by distance, even when the costs of delivery changed markedly according to what was actually involved. Hence a distant branchline that was costly to serve might not cost much more to the customer than a more easily served mainline destination closer to capital or port. And certain traffics might be advantaged to customer; never to the railway.

Little pressure was brought to bear on the enterprise therefore to actually become more efficient. And with road transport bearing upon them, orders of magnitude of efficiency would be required. Technology, as explained above, could help. But at the end of the day, leadership and management were lacking when they were needed most.

A railway of steam locomotive-hauled passenger trains using staff and tickets, substantial staffed stations and could have been quickly transformed into a system of EMUs and railmotors, using simplified signalling and unstaffed halts with onboard or agency ticketing. The 1920s would have been the right time to have done it.

Conclusion
I’ve long been a believer the rot started long ago, and so long ago that we can scarcely recognise the cause; few around today would have seen the world where it was not the case.

Whether your fond memories were 1960s steam, 1970s branchlines, 1980s mainline express trains or even 1990s vestigal suburban trains that have now passed from use, what you were seeing was the dregs, the tail end of a system that started dying before most of us were born.

It would be hard to make meaningful second guessing of decisions taken in the 1850s or 1880s, the world was still a very different place then. By the 1920s, however, enough of the modern world was visible for informed descendents to judge how effective contemporary decision making was.

With the advent of road transport, rail would no longer be unchallenged on most passenger and freight tasks. Technology was moving to improve rail incrementally; but the capital was not able to be raised; and the will not summoned to divert funds from those parts of the network that could not be saved, to those that could.

What had confronted the 1850s and 1880s decision maker as a clear advantage to rail; the same day journey or the same week goods haul, would soon not be enough. Days would turn to hours and rail would lose massively.

What survives from the 1920s? Suburban electrification in Melbourne and Sydney provided an asset that could be drawn down for the next several decades; only now are realising its limitations. Train order working and a big locomotive and rolling stock policy did not really leave South Australia until the 1950s and 60s, so I’m not sure it was a success. Branchline railmotors did at least point the way to the least cost way of carrying country and interurban passengers, with Vline’s Velocities the descendents of generations of rail motors, arguably the way it should always have been.

However, I’d like to share my connection with a marvellous work from the 1970s – Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey – Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th Century. An one special chapter from among many worthy chapters on such matters as the shrinking of space/time in the popular consciousness, the impact on urban form, the impact on industrial/occupational medicine and on social customs all in the first century of railway development.

As my readers know, the thing I hate most in modern day political discourse, particularly when it comes to railways, transport and urban planning – is ’spongy’ thinking. Fluffy thinking. The fluffy bunnies. The middle class pleading for welfare. False victimhood. Words losing their meaning. Fallacious thinking, especially post hoc ergo prompter hoc, which was Railpage par excellence. And where Railpage went, Ministerial Media Advisors were sure to follow.

Railpage is thankfully dead – but its memory lives on in my blogs, and the small group of us committed to clear thinking in the aid of efficient rail and transport policy and planning.

The chapter from Schivelbusch I will share is on The Compartment and how the fundamentals of railway economics actually drove the development of rail design and engineering, and how cultural commentators can misconstrue these developments to fit their cultural biases and agenda.

Schivelbusch describes the European experience of mass transport in the 1700s – the coach and horses, and how it impacted on early railway design and thinking. The early wagon builders had only a couple of basic designs – a flat wagon on 2 single axles, and a coal variant with walls. Axles were not pivoting and the train as a whole could only bend at the couplings, or with very limited purchase at the wheel-rail interface, before the wheel profile and flanges might fail and the train derail. Hence the train itself could not bend very much, and civil engineering therefore favoured long straight sections, with mountains and valleys tackled by cuttings, tunnels and viaducts at obviously considerable expense.

With a single flattop wagon body, the passenger market at first assumed a first or second class passenger would bring his own coach onboard.
As rail travel expanded to more, albeit still wealthy, passengers, a fixed coach body mounted or built onto the same wagon chassis was then offered. The first or second class passenger then sat in a confined compartment, as in a road coach, on a stiff upright seat with upholstery, facing his fellow passengers. Doors were locked from the outside as a concession to the safety risk of falling at much higher speeds than had been the case with horses.

All the while, third class passengers road in open sided wagons, though roofs and eventually rough benches appeared.

This development had rested on two pillars. First, Europe was short of land but not short of labour. Hence the economic fundamentals favoured building direct railways wherever possible, cutting through whatever the landscape required. This placed no pressure on passenger carriage design as it was assumed a) the journey would be shortish b) a break would be taken at a sizeable town of which many existed. c) the horse coach was still the design influence of people who worked in the carriage industry in the early days.

Schivelbusch then contrasts the American experience. With the economics reversed – ie labour being expensive but land cheap, it worked out advantageous to railroad builders to avoid expensive cuts and viaducts where possible, but to go for curves and grades. Because of the strain this would place on train flexibility around curves, the bogie quickly came into its own and became standard on firstly passenger then freight rolling stock. Such rollingstock inevitably ended up quite a bit longer than the 4-wheeled European equivalent, which meant that rather than at most 3 compartments per coach on a European passenger carriage – the American might have 3 or 4 times that many.

The US equivalent of mass transport was not the coach (though there are many famous examples of it) but the canal packet and the riverboat. The design influences and market demands of long distance transport had already been determined via marine transport and hence the famous images of card playing smoking lounges, sleeping berths, on-vessel dining and drinking, and even just the open seating area of the ’saloon’ were quickly translated onto the US railroad car. The bogies and the additional length made this possible.

Unlike the European train, there was no guarantee the journey would be ’shortish’ or that there would be regular breaks for calls of nature or for dining, as would be the case in Europe.

By the end of the civil war, according to Schivelbusch, there was enough of an income spread for the most luxurious extents of the riverboat culture to be integrated into the sleeping car – as the Pullman.

So we have two primary influences on the divergence of US and European practices – the economics of building fast versus slow railways – and the design precedents at work in the industry being based on coaching practice in Europe but inland waterway transport in the US.

This seems reasonable enough until Schivelbusch introduces the inevitable cultural commentators – the parliamentary junket taker of the 1800s writing the inevitable report on how the other side of the Atlantic live – or the travel columnist of the weekend paper of the time – and so on.

And how none of them spot these influences, but instead ascribe the differences to the lazy, emotionally loaded usual suspects – the ‘casualness of the American’ versus the ’stiffness and class-consciousness of the European’ – the respect for the old traditions versus the New World pioneer and other silly stereotypes.

And when confronted with the possibility of the alternative type of wagon being transported across the Atlantic – the sheer impossibility of it. The Europeans would never accept it, according to these commentators. Being stuck bolt upright in a small compartment, locked in and trapped was clearly preferable to the insufferable possibility of seeing other passengers in a saloon car. Quasi medical excuses given for how a European could never sleep on a train.

Rather than face the fact that the bogie was a technical innovation whose need was clearly greater in the USA, but was becoming useful in Europe too.

After a series of high profile on-board murders, well before Agatha Christie, raised the danger of being stuck in a locked compartment with someonie who might want to kill you, the Europeans explored the possibility of how one might escape, or at least alert the train staff of the danger whilst in motion. Peep holes and other silly nonsense were suggested in parliamentary enquiries and newspaper editorials – but nothing so logical as a saloon car where the perpetrator might feel much less inclined to kill with witnesses – and where escape might be possible for a potential victim.

Anything but adopt an American innovation!

Eventually the Europeans settled on side corridor compartment bogie car- such as would become standard European car design till well into the C20th – whilst in the USA the saloon car became standard.

Even in Australia we saw a tension between the dog boxes in many cities – Brisbane’s Evans cars for example, and the saloon stock that replaced them, such as Melbourne’s Taits.

This might seem a curious but historic post hoc fallacy from a distant world, and not worthy of further discussion.

But it is typical of so many post hoc rationalisations I have read in the recent media, on railfan blogs and forums and elsewhere.

I am lead to believe Australians won’t stand on trains, they won’t change trains, they won’t pay the full price of tickets, they won’t catch a bus to the station. They won’t do various things that people overseas routinely do given the right information and incentives. Why?

Because they are Australian? Because of their ‘culture’? Their ‘laziness’ characterised in the Asian press, means they can’t stand up? Their mental vacuity means they can’t work out how to change trains?

If I followed these sorts of sentiments to their natural limits I would be either accused of racism or in a position to accuse others of it.

Point being, any country, whether the India of the chaotic Indians, the China of the scheming and cheating Chinese, or the Arabia of the ungovernable Arabs – if you install a modern underground railway system like the ones say in Delhi or Shanghai or Dubai – if you install such a system with clear rules, modern reliable technology and well maintained systems – you get a similar result no matter what the culture.

To look at the problems of Australian transport and rail in particular and to find cute ‘cultural’ defences rather than genuine systemic weaknesses; that is the same laziness that Schivelbusch pointed to in the 19th century and which he wrote about 30 years ago.

If this feebleness and spongy thinking was limited to only railfan forums that would be one thing – but when I hear similar utterances from the mouths of Transport Ministers or academics who should know better – then I can see the problems such spongy thinking will cause for rational planning and policy.

I see it when I read Lynne Kosky saying that Myki’s problems were inevitable because Melbourne people ‘love’ their zone system. I recall Hong Kong people ‘loved’ their last ride bonus (who remembers having 3 or 4 different stored value cards in their wallet, all with small amounts on them, to benefit from this bonus?) but happily sacrificed it for a better system, the Octopus, which had no such bonus but other benefits.

I see this feebleness of mind too when I read how metros ‘don’t work’ according to several newspaper editorials and politicial commentators – when all they are really saying is they would rather the money spent in the underserved extremities of Sydney, as opposed to the congested but served inner areas.

I worry these things become an echo-chamber. If the Office of National Assessments, charged with providing the Prime Minister with clear information on national security, only regurgitates its own and public domain information rather than genuine secret intelligence, as happened in the Iraq war – you have to wonder how low the public service can go in getting genuine new, independent and accurate advice, rather than simply quoting the usual sources, from the same small intellectual pond that is Australia.

Anyway, I recommend Schivelbusch for this topic and several others on how rail transport changed the 19th century world. It is changing the world of many developing countries too. I suspect India and China are right now experiencing the changes Schivelbusch documented – towns becoming cities and villages becoming suburbs. The world shrinking and becoming more interconnected. And we are seeing something Schivelbusch never saw, with the internet further changing interpersonal relations in a way even the 1970s never forsaw.

Most railway historians immediately associate Sir John Monash with being the engineer in charge of the Outer Circle railway in his early days, and possibly his involvement in arbitration of settling disputes over payment of contracts between firms engaged to build railways and the various State railway systems at the start of the 20th century.

On Sir John Monash’s return triumphantly to Australia, heralded throughout as a war hero, he was approached by innumerable requests to enter State and Federal politics (which was mainly dissuaded by an antipathy to Billy Hughes which was derived from the two falling out over aspects of repatriating AIF troops, amongst other things), to take up many bureaucratic roles such as a planned review on taxation that fell through, or to be the director of a large volume of companies and many associations.

One offer, which was made from the Victorian State Government through Sir James Barrett, Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University (which he retained strong links with throughout his life) was to be the Chairman of Commissioners of the Victorian Railways in April 1919.

Sir John Monash refused the role on two grounds.

Firstly at the time he did not wish to accept a State Government appointment at the time, citing “…[the position would mean he would] surrender [his] individual freedoms…”. This is strange when you look at his later acceptance of the Chief Commissioner of the State Electricity Commission a year later, a role which he held for eleven years until his death in 1931. As well, he never felt encumbered by the bureaucracy when he wished to get his own way with the Cabinet; Sir Robert Menzies recalled that, as a junior member of the Nationalist McPherson State cabinet in 1928 and 1929 that when a proposal was rejected by the ministry, he would walk unannounced straight into the Cabinet room mid-meeting and, on finding out that his proposal was rejected would simply say that “[the proposal's rejection]…can only be because they’ve [the cabinet] have utterly failed to understand it”, and on convincing the Cabinet of the error of their ways, would produce a pre-prepared Order-In-Council which was duly signed by the now cowed Ministers or Premier.

Having said that, it is recorded that he had some rather major battles over the LaTrobe Valley brown coal generation scheme, enduring one searching enquiry and a lot of pressure from rural areas wanting massive subsidies and local councils wanting to retain lucrative electric supply companies.
Even so, the first reason of not wishing to subjugate his independence to a State Government seems somewhat spurious given this example and the many times when he would push his plans and ideas against both wartime and peacetime establishments.

Secondly, and probably more telling is that, when a journalist asked for comment on it, he was quoted as saying: “No! it’s tempting, but I won’t accept it… There’s nothing further to be done with railways. They’re at their last ditch”. As for the reasons for Monash holding that opinion, it could be thought that his experiences on the Outer Circle may have had a bearing on it; at a lecture he presented in August 1890 to the Engineering Students’ Society at Melbourne University, he describes ‘the critical government inspector whose ‘especial delight’ is to point out that some bridge or culvert is being built upside down’. It is not recorded what effect the failure of the Outer Circle railway had on his opinions of railways, however his engineering standards, demonstrated in the use of the Fairfield railway bridge for road traffic 120 years later, cannot be disputed.

The Victorian Railways also were not a big adopter of reinforced concrete at the turn of the century, the pipes that he was manufacturing in conjunction with David Mitchell were described as being viewed by the VR as ‘thoroughly prejudiced’; did Monash also develop such prejudices himself?

It is recorded that almost exactly a year later, in April 1920, Harold Winthrop Clapp, whose father had obtained a great degree of financial success running Melbourne’s cable tramway system, applied for and was appointed as the Chief Commissioner of the Victorian Railways.

His achievements such as providing a market for freight traffic through marketing, the adoption of American passenger train styling for the Spirit of Progress and, through the lionising by people like Patsy Adam-Smith, his rapport with the employees of the Victorian Railways, and later his work with the Land Transport Board and paving the way for re-gauging the south-eastern railways of Victoria are testament to his works.

Having said that, his legacy was not all brilliant; a large number of unprofitable branch lines (such as the white elephants of Red Hill, Alvie, Stony Crossing and Sea Lake-Kulwin), and did very little for metropolitan Mebourne, despite plans being presented in 1938 which were not acted upon. He was also regarded as merely a showman (so much so he was also known as ‘Clever Mary’) – someone who would do something for publicity rather than making substantive changes to the railway system which was desperately needed at the time, with a network that was tipped to be too inflexible and antiquated to handle a major upsurge in traffic; something that was proved right in World War 2.

But what differences would have been made if Monash had have accepted the post of Chief Commissioner of the VR rather than the SEC a year later?

We know that he travelled overseas in 1910 between March and November to both England, continental Europe (where his family had arrived from a generation prior) and the United States as the head of his successful enterprise building reinforced concrete structures. He was very interested in the transportation systems in use; from the Swiss railways to the London underground to Penn Station and the road traffic in Chicago.

Had he taken the appointment as Chief Commissioner, it would have been fortuitous that Merz’s programme of suburban electrification was in full swing; his opinions of steam traction was that it was “effete” and was disdainful of the nuisances caused by the smoke of the steam locomotives. Given his interest in electricity in his SEC involvement also supports this claim. Certainly it can be assumed that his low regard for steam may well have meant an interest possibly in a greater level of electrification of railways than the limited amount given to commuter passenger train working; it may have resulted in such electrification that was seen emerging in Europe and later the US on such systems as the Milwaulkee Road – certainly the grades of the Bendigo, Ballarat and North-Eastern lines would have been tempting.

We know that he also he was enamoured by the Underground systems of London, Paris and Berlin – given the Ashworth Report on Melbourne’s suburban system recommendations of introducing two underground railways from Flinders St to North Fitzroy (under his alma mater at Melbourne University) and to North Melbourne – he may have been much more inclined to introduce these to Melbourne, or an expanded version.

As well, he was no fan of the rural lobby and was not interested in subsidising the rural areas’ electricity costs in favour of the profitability of the SEC, which was, like the VR, not in great shape financially at the time (although the SEC started turning a profit). What would have been his reactions for proposals for loss-making railways to such places as Wensleydale or Lette or past Nowingi? I doubt that the various Railway Leagues, although he had offered his professional services to the Fitzroy Railway League at the turn of the 20th century, would have brooked a great deal of opposition. We may have seen the closure of several extremely unprofitable railways rather than their lingering terminal declines whcih we still witness north of Sea Lake and Swan Hill.

It is a good possibility that he would have earned the equal respect of the employees that Clapp commanded; it is telling that during the darkest periods of the 1930’s Depression, he was openly talked about as being the nation’s leader; something which he declined as well.

Given that he was quoted as having given ’scornful comments on our backwardness’ in regard to transportation on at least several of the interviews and lectures he gave, it is not surprising that he declined the position. It is interesting that 100 years later, the same opinions are now expressed broadly at the railway systems in Australia; was Monash more perspicacious in seeing the decline of the railways since the 1880’s boom?

What we can assume is that as far as the overall health of the railways stands now; we most likely would be, especially in urban Melbourne, a much better position if Monash had have accepted the job, or even if it had have been offered in 1920. How much though, remains something we may not be able to determine, but it certainly reflects the task ahead for someone wanting to progress heavy railed transport into the future.

As we enter the second decade of the C21th we are now 100 years from the flowering of this movement in Australia and its finest moment – the competition for the design of a federal capital. As history records, the capital, eventually named Canberra, was designed by Walter Burley Griffin though the Canberra we see today is a significant departure from that design.

Given the book is devoted to an architecture topic outside the scope of this forum, I’ll confine my notes to the ramifications of the original and subsequent design work on the federal capital to the transport/urban planning interface – which Freestone hardly mentions but will be of interest to readers of this forum.

I’ll start by mentioning that Griffin’s design was 1 of over 100 submitted to the competition; that the original design was only expected to cover a township of 25000 (though clearly a stencil for future growth); that bureaucrats in the Department of Public Works already had their own bottom draw designs and were working on these even during the period Griffin was appointed to oversea development of his design.

Much of the criticism of Griffin, as pointed out by Freestone, related to his personal management style and was also in large part self-serving, rather than directed at fundamental weaknesses in the design. It was said to ‘lack detail’ – I’m not sure how realistic it was in 1912 for an architect entering a competition at his own expense (only compensated if he won) to provide much more than inspiration and some lovely artwork.

I’ll also jump in at this point to state my respect for his original design – I’ll come back to some of the specific transport issues shortly. And my respect is not to denigrate some of the alternatives. which Freestone comments on. The year 1912 happened to be right on the cusp of the outbreak of modernism, the penumbra of the classical and it is no surprise that the competition entries straddled the divide. To paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright, the “Roman”[classical] period was complete and did not need to be added to.

Alternative plans mimicked Washington DC closely; the same park setting but classically dressed public monuments and free standing government buildings rather than the modernism which defines Canberra today.

Griffin’s Canberra was not really built, except for a limited precinct around the Civic/Capitol/War Memorial axis. The Canberra we see today is a the 1950s vision, and quite a different rendering of the bush capital. In some ways, more Australian though I don’t mean to flatter by that remark.

Urban Planning

It is clear from the early drawings that Griffin’s federal capital, though considerably smaller at approximately 75,000 people (3 times the design requirement) was also a denser city. It would be polynuclear in the sense of separate land uses (administration, retail, housing, municipal and so on) but mononuclear in the sense that each of these land uses need only be provided once within the stencil.

It was certainly a city you could walk around. You would be able to walk around the precincts that involved your daily business (eg if you were a public servant, the government district was compact enough to walk, if you were a shopper, the retail district would be similarly walkable)

As stated above, Griffin was not providing the detail – but I would imagine that his assumption of housing density would be as prevailed in the early C20th – and he would not have been averse to walk-up multistorey developments if this suited the economics of the city.

Transport

In addition to the motor car, which at this point was still a luxury to most, Griffin assumed a tramway would be built, and an underground railway easement is marked. The mainline railway is shown as having a terminal and yard in North Canberra – which is no doubt consistent with a line from Yass (or a diversion of the Sydney-Melbourne railway). It has been my understanding that the Queanbeyan-Canberra railway was touted as a ‘construction railway only’ and temporary, as with much of Canberra.

While one is tempted to be cynical about the claim of ‘temporary’ – I suspect it is true in so many ways. And that transport and urban planning was sabotaged in Canberra as much as was every other aspect of Griffin’s plan by the usual suspects. The Parliament building was not completed until 1927 (temporary) and much of the federal bureaucracy was yet to move to Canberra even in the 1960s.

And what are the usual suspects?
The Department of Public Works and the parsimonious bureaucrats could be the symptom, the tip of the iceberg, but then what is the iceberg?

I put it down to the fundamental factors that really delayed and marred the development of a national capital.

First, the lack of real support for a federal capital in the first place. Freestone mentions this as a recurring theme, particularly in the context of the lack of support for public monument building. In one sense, Canberra was one big public monument, and therefore suffered in toto.

This lack of support ranged from Western Australian secessionism through to Melbourne and Sydney supremacy in the economic and political spheres. All the money to pay from Canberra came from taxes, there was no incidental development of a commercial and public city from the outcome of market interactions.

It wasn’t so much that transport modal choices were being deliberately biased; but that Canberra simply lacked the population or development to make much beyond private motoring worthwhile until well after WWII, at which point it was bound to be caught up in the pro-road policies of post war governments.

If Canberra had thrived in the immediate aftermath of the federal capital competition and Griffin’s plan, I expect we would have seen both a tramway network, and a more compact city to support it. It would remain to be seen whether such a tramway would have survived the tram-removal fetish of the 1950s – with wide streets, newish rolling stock and fewer economic booms and busts (such as characterised the lot of the state capitals) it is possible it might have been retained.

Wide streets, no, boulevards may not be unambiguously good for PT. The Griffin template had a network of “St Kilda Roads” with four carriageways, the centre occupied by trams. As Freestone points out, Boulevard in the French mind is many things, an evening stroll, a frontage for cafes and markets, and a grand street for processions and parades. The strolling and cafes probably wouldn’t have flown, Freestone suggests. And while St Kilda Rd does permit continuous tramway traffic to permeate it even today, it is not the quickest way of delivering people to the city – numerous traffic signals slow progress. Those signals reflect the importance of private road transport – which was facilitated by Griffin’s plan.

Cities of boulevards are quite difficult for pedestrians to go about their daily affairs. Buenos Aires has one of the world’s widest, and it makes it quite unpleasant to go from one side to the other. Even in Paris, some boulevards become a matter, for the tourist, of which metro station to alight at, depending on which side of some roundabout or park you want to get to.

Those European cities in the mediaeval mould, on the other hand, can be difficult to get around by car, but wonderful for pedestrians (depending on their approach to managing traffic, and the availability of PT). Freestone also makes the side note that it isn’t just scale, but building frontage that makes the city ped-friendly. The grand monumental public buildings proposed (and delivered) sitting on their own sites tend to frustrate and block the pedestrians. Such buildings are rarely permeable, the parkland looks nice but serves no other purpose, and the result is distances that are difficult to walk.

Would the underground rail network have worked?

Not for 25,000 people I dare say or even 75,000 – the sorts of ridership you would be looking for, say 8000 pax per hour, would be hard pressed to find enough people to actually ride such a system (assuming, for example, 10% of the city’s population are riding the trains at any one time, who’s running the place?) And that is on top of the population otherwise riding the tram, driving, walking, cycling and however other methods might have been found.

If Griffin’s template could have produced a city of millions – Washington style, then of course it is a different matter. Each of his separate precincts, retail, government, municipal and so on, would have almost required an underground railway. So the clerk in the Prime Minister’s Department could have his beer in the retail district pub after work, but then ride to his home in the residential suburb, and maybe take his kids to the public monument district or park districts on weekends.

But Canberra could never be a city of millions while Australia barely had that to its name as a whole. Which comes back to the failure of the Australian promise – the failure to be able to attract settlement (of the desirable kind: white, English-speaking and loyal to the Crown) in sufficient numbers.

Of course you don’t attract millions so that you can build an underground in the nation’s capital (at a time when the state capitals were underserved by underground railways and had many more people).

And the mainline railway?

This comes back to the general gripes with the NSWGR. Though the Commonwealth Railways owned the short Canberra branchline, they were in effect dependent for the whole period on the service of the NSWGR, who operated it as a slightly more prominent branch service off their vast but poorly built statewide network.

It had a through sleeping car – but so did Coonabarabran if my memory serves me. No real attempt was made by the NSW authorities to accord the service the dignity that even Newcastle received with its Flyer, and as if to spite the national capital, places like Goulburn were made the local hubs of activity and terminus for major passenger trains.

The NSWGR was built as an agricultural development railway, but kept as a pork barrel for Country Party voters – with funds for marginal services ensuring those lines of business that might have been worth pursuing – high density urban passenger rail, premium intercity passenger rail and heavy freight (either forwarded general freight, or bulk) were kept undercapitalised enough to give the road competition the head start.

If the focus had been kept on reducing journey times, upping axle loads, payload lengths, loco sizes and operating efficiencies, it would not be difficult to imagine a straight and fast line from Sydney to Goulburn and Canberra, such that an off-the-shelf tilting train today might be doing the run in say 2.5 hours, and competing centre to centre with aviation.

And a sensible heavy railway on the direct route might have a freight yard for local produce, containerised general freight into the city from Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane or beyond.

Such a railway might have also supported a modest interurban rail service out of the area – with settlements such as Yass being confirmed suburbs of the city. Certainly the desirable Southern Highlands towns of Bowral, Mittagong and so on would be as much Canberra’s playground as Sydney’s.

Again, the NSWGR would have been within their rights to say they staged development of a Canberra railway around the Fed’s progress with actually building the city.

By the 1950s when a real prospect of a federal capital was in reach, the feast had moved on, with road and air links being more important. Canberra has certainly never suffered a lack of domestic aviation into its airfield, definitely ahead of cities that were already larger such as Newcastle or Townsville.

[As an aside, I never thought a bog-standard NSWGR trestle across the Molonglo, or potentially across the ornamental lake, did justice to Griffin’s plan. .They might as well put the whole thing out of its misery and sell the Kingston site if they need the money. Any future fixed rail in the ACT depends on urban passenger traffic, including potentially to Queanbeyan, and a high speed train would be better coming from the north.]

It is also not just the failing of the original Australian promise of settlement and growth, but also the lack of economic growth and economic development. Add in that the Great Depression probably on the ground hit Australia harder than most developed economies, that WWII, while not physically disruptive, was not the economic enhancement to Australia that it was to much of the developed world.

Just to diverge: The UK Treasury estimated in 1952 that the entire cost of WWII to the UK had been regained in improved productivity from wartime capitalisation, and stopped just short of thanking the Germans for their aerial demolition of London’s redundant port facilities, which were superceded in more productive ports elsewhere in the UK!

But that was not really the case in Australia. So much lost time between 1912 and 1950. Not just within Canberra, but also in the states, whose economies did not really develop much during that time.

Economic development also drives sophistication in political policy and regulation.

Washington was already, in 1912, a significant place for businesses to lobby, for economic policies to be made, for the indulgences of the rich and powerful to be played out in the political sphere. This didn’t matter whether you were cattle baron, speculator, property developer, industrialist or whatever. DC was the place to be.

Australia remained a state-focused place for many years. The levers of political influence remained in the state capitals for decades (as did many of the federal bureaucracies in the event). Basics such as company regulation, infrastructure and industrial standards were state issues. Our cockies and squattocrats looked to their state representatives to protect them, even as Section 92 marched on.

And Australia never had the military procurement culture of the US. Even if Defence had been in Russell in the early years, I suspect we wouldn’t have seen the revolving door of influence in Russell that exists in Washington.

The Constitution was a shopping list of minutiae – with the Feds getting the post office, the lighthouses, meteorology and other trivia.

Even where constitutional law was screaming out the possibility of centralisation, such as through the corporations power, the Interstate Commission (that never was) or centralised wage fixing – it was a long time coming. One can imagine the Engineers Case of 1920 as a bridge across the Rubicon of States’ rights that was never crossed – well not until the recent Workchoices case. We did not, in that sense, use the scope that the US Congress was afforded under their constitution to expand the power of Washington over the economy.

So one wonders, even if the population had been there – what would there have been there to do in Canberra, such as would merit a large capital.

Maybe Griffin was right – and a constitutionally modest Canberra, administering a limited range of national functions (and the lighthouses), would have been best kept within say a 5km radius of Capitol Hill, with a small tramway network and a nice big railway station in its northern quarter.

I have argued before the whole ACT was a mistake – the Federal territory should only ever have been excised from NSW around the actual institutions of the Federal Government – to encompass the Parliament, the Executive, the GG, the foreign embassies, the High Court, and perhaps the Defence/Security establishment. Such a territory could have easily been a mere 10sqkm or so. Any extra land required for public servants’ housing, retail and so on, could have been within NSW, within an extended Queanbeyan.

A real Washington DC, with a Maryland and Virginia to house its people.

Federal capitals are always fraught, and as Freestone points out, for grandiose schemes to succeed they need authoritarians behind them. Just as Haussman needed Louis Napoleon, and Speer needed Hitler, so to did Putrajaya need Mahathir in our time. There is no shame in wanting a city to be a national monument. We should never pretend there is an economic payback – but realise that having a capital is the curse of being a nation state.

And having a federal capital is the curse of being a federation.

It is interesting to see how Europe is dealing with this. Brussels was only ever an obscure political compromise of the 1960s and now seems irrelevant and redundant coming into 2010. If anything, the only payoff seems to be to hold the centrifugal forces of Belgian bi-communalism together a few more decades. Brussels is of course “Francophone but not in France” just as Canberra is “in NSW but not of it”.

A real European capital would probably be closer to the geographical centre, more steeped in the angst of pan-European conflicts and culture (perhaps on the Germano-Slavic divide) and potentially a new city, or a “Bonn” built up. I’d wager somewhere near Trieste, Ljubliana and Klagenfurt – the interaction of the Germanic, the Slavic and the Romance.

At least Brussels has a good modern transport system, to bring this post back to the topic.

A modern enclosed shopping centre is arguably the new walkable retail district, in the original mould. Having an enclosed shopping centre in each of the towns means that the original retail commercial centre at Civic can never be much more than the walk-about centre of its mmediate environs.

While you are free to live in which ever suburb you wish (or across the border), in practice the homogenous nature of Canberra housing means there is no particular reason not to live in a suburb of the town you work in. And much of this type of commuting is of course done by car.

And judging by the ABC News Radio traffic broadcasts in the morning, it is rare indeed for Canberra to suffer the all encompassing congestion and slow journey times that keep rail transport in business in the five mainland state capitals.

If Griffin’s electric tramways had been “US Interurban” in flavour, with long sections of rail-style cross-country running on separate corridors, they could have been a template for a modern inter-town electric rail system.

Of course, this idea has also considerable weaknesses. The town centres are not compact in themselves either – so unless multiple stations/stops were provided, it might be hard to use them to get around locally. And by definition the town centres are supposed to be very similar – providing very little reason to leave them. There is no sense leaving Woden Plaza and journey for 30 minutes to …visit another shopping mall in Belconnen?

I would be interested in a US perspective on Canberra’s prospects for fixed-rail transport. The low density, car friendly characteristics have been overcome in several US light rail schemes – but the city is very small.

And ‘commuter rail’ in the smaller cities that have benefited from it have often used it to overcome freeway congestion (more cost-effective than extra lanes) which is absent in Canberra, and the freight rail infrastructure they are using is in better condition than the former NSWGR.

The public debate has moved away from privatisation of government functions, but has not swung back in any big way to a larger state sector.

Canberra may yet grow from accretion, but I doubt it will grow in the Whitlamesque way, with active consideration of new state functions and the staff to support them. Which means no grand plans for transport which can’t be justified by extra population.

Now the ACT is self-governing and has dreams of its own light rail network, I’m not sure there is any constituency for this thinking though. The Federal Government is still the largest employer in town – and they conspicuously recruit Australia wide, permanently turning Canberra into a city of migrants, never quite interested in its fate.

Too many Commonwealth public servants I have met still cast one eye towards the house they hope to buy in Sydney or Melbourne or Noosa, when they have had enough or saved enough. You still experience the mad rush on a Friday night at the airport and the expression “Last one out please turn off the lights” is still widely used. {I suspect the MPs and their vast legions of staff are also largely responsible for this effect, as they conspicuously crowd the airport}. I even recall when the hospital implosion tragedy happened, they said they staged the event to stop people leaving on weekends!

I therefore suspect there are too few people in Canberra with enough roots there to make it want to prosper, even before you have to deal with the other 21 million Australians and their views of the place.

The Ottawa model might be better for Canberra (better for Canberra than Ottawa I suspect). Buses along busways with a bit of fixed infrastructure in the town centres, and dedicated lanes on the intertown highways.

If the towns were able to build up density in their centres, that might at least provide a constituency of people who don’t use private motor transport for their every move—that might be users of PT in a future life.

And we should not forget the enthusiasm for cycling. You can get them out of their cars in the right circumstances.

But Canberra is definitely ‘pro-road’ in extremis, its town planning, modal investment, its size, and operational policies like parking completely unfriendly to PT.

I don’t know if Griffin’s Canberra could ever have lived down the ‘bush capital’ label; but it could conceivably have been a very diffferent place to live. A mini-Washington and a small European new town at the same time. A pleasant university campus of a place, with a little tramway and compact walkable centre. Dreams are free!

I’ve been a bit guarded about my line of work but let’s just imagine this post is relevant to it.

I caught the end of an exchange in the Herald Sun letters section. The person was chastising another, presumably an employee of Coles or Woolworths, for a remark contributed. The chastiser was pointing out that employees of the supermarkets should not be supporting the self-serve checkouts, lest they deal themselves out of a job.

It follows the old furphy about whether you should deliberately leave a mess at McDonalds, to give their staff something to do; and therefore their bosses a reason to employ them.

It got me to thinking about the public transport system and what level of support there should be from staff for improvements to productivity, some of which might cost jobs, others of which might boost ridership, and therefore save, or even create, jobs.

NSW and Queensland rail operators still have guards on board the trains. NSW still has considerable numbers of staff in ticket boxes selling tickets, in most cases parallel to machines that can also sell tickets.

Releasing this labour could both save costs and also improve service quality, for example, by improving the frequency of trains by diverting guards to the driver pool. Of course this is somewhat simplistic but in the longer term, would boost service quality and therefore ridership and bottom line.

A driverless metro would do even more to ‘multiply’ the productivity of such staff as are employed.

And finally, public transport reform boosts the productivity of the city as a whole – and that provides even more jobs.

The downsides are of course whether people’s existing skills can be transferred or upgraded. And the minutiae of current employment grades and rates. And all the status and kudos that people feel in their current jobs, which reform could undermine.

And the political system lacks the credibility to deliver on these ‘quid-pro-quo’ arrangements. Staff are rightly suspicious of undertakings for better or higher paid employment after a transition.

It takes a special kind of turkey to vote for Christmas.

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

Source: Signalboxes.com

Recent issues of UK rail magazines have discussed the merits of extending conventional (medium speed up to 200km/h) rail services along the remaining non-electrified main lines in that country. Some of these have recently been announced, including in Scotland, while other iconic possibilities include the Great Western Railway territory, a famous home of fast but conventional trains and deemed for many years, too low density for electrification.

The UK is one of the rail systems in Europe at the low end of mainline electrification reach. While some of the important lengths of the country have been spanned since the 1970s and 1980s, such as both mainlines to Scotland, and the shorter network towards the south east on the third rail system since the 1930s, the UK has manifested some of the anti-electrification habits that we see in this country. While the 1970s gave everyone a shock on energy security and price issues, the UK felt somewhat insulated, for a time, by its oil deposits in the North Sea.

An immediate focus on the developing a medium to high speed option in the Intercity 125 (now class 43), the precursor to the Australian XPT, responded to the demand for a faster intercity service that forestalled, at least for a few years, the possibility of electrification on major routes to the North and West. With a passenger:freight traffic ratio favouring passenger, the UK had no major drive to reduce fuel costs for rail freight hauls, also tending not to push for electrification.

Notwithstanding this, the mainlines to Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester were electrified in the 1970s, while the north eastern mainlines to Leeds and Edinburgh with some local Scottish routes were electrified in the 1980s. With electrification came some limited attempts to increase mainline maximum speeds above what the class 43 had been rated at, with the north eastern mainline rerated at 225km, grazing the lower limit of what some would call high speed rail. However, this was not feasible on the west coast route which led to attempts to reduce transit time using tilting trains. The first such attempt in the 1970s was a failure, however, tilting trains have since found a home in the UK.

The only challenge to date from high speed rail has been in the SE, linking to France and the extensive continental high speed network. The technology and operating practices for this service have been unapologetically and explicitly Continental. It was not felt wise to be developing a home-grown template for high speed services, such as occurred in Mainland Europe, with separate seeds for high speed in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Conventional rail electrification in the UK is probably at its technological limits, but not its limits of extent, hence the recent debate and announcements.

In Australia there have been roughly three phases (but not three-phase, as such) to mainline electrification. The first was largely abortive, with planned developments to Newcastle not proceeding in the 1920s. Suburban railways in Sydney and Melbourne were electrified. The principal driver was to reduce the heavy loco operational and maintenance costs associated with steam operation, and increase speeds at the margin, and traffic density, within the suburban passenger area.

The Melbourne network was more extensive and took electrification a long way into the rural hinterland but generally not on the mainline network.

Electric locomotives were built, but only used on local shunting trips. St Albans was the extent on the Bendigo line however no attempt was made to use electric locomotives to haul goods or passengers to the limit and steam beyond, as occurred in Wellington. The same applied to Dandenong.

Broadmeadows, which might also have benefitted from electric haulage (at the top of a long grade) was probably also too close to Melbourne to warrant such a change – and a bypass freight line was built that reduced the consequences of the adverse grade.

Electric motive power was swapped at the boundaries of the electrified network at Lilydale and Frankston. These services were very low density and rural, and offered little practical benefit in swapping motive power. Services to the ends of the low density rural network at Hurstbridge and Upper Ferntree Gully were delivered, in all likelihood to remove the requirement for steam locomotives based at the extremities.

Sydney had a much more limited electric network. Hornsby and Sutherland, like Broadmeadows, sat at the top of a heavy grade and might have benefitted from electric haulage, however, no serious attempt was made to do so.

The other extremities were purely suburban and on easier grades. None was far enough from Sydney to provide any benefit from mainline haulage, as the swap would occur to close to the city centre.

The principal benefit in Sydney’s case of electrification was to enable an earlier start on a city underground than had been delivered elsewhere. As the 1920s came to a close, and economic decline set in, the Sydney and Melbourne networks stood as they would for another 30 years.

The 1950s and 60s saw the second push towards mainline electrification. In both the Victorian and NSW examples, this time the key driver was heavy mainline freights, and the cost of locomotive exchanging was factored into this case. In the NSW case, the extreme mainline grades on the Central Coast and Blue Mountains routes provided the main differential benefit over steam, while in Victoria’s case the expected high traffic densities meritted the work over a dense steam operation.

In both cases passengers also benefitted, although only in NSW was a dedicated set of electric rollingstock provided for the service. This reflected much higher passenger traffic densities on the Sydney lines, while in Melbourne using electric locomotives to haul conventional long distance passenger services sufficed.

The NSW electrifications also provided the opportunity to extend suburban passenger services, in the western case, to Penrith, and in the northern case to the somewhat artificial terminus of Cowan. This pattern continued in the late 1960s as electric coal haulage to Glenlee provided the first electric suburban trains to Campbelltown.

In Melbourne this should also have been possible – except that apart from a few workers trains a short distance past the Dandenong limit, it was not taken up until the mid 1970s.

In some ways the 1950s electrification movement was a false dawn – not waiting to see the benefits of dieselisation, which reduced operating costs by a similar amount without the heavy capital requirement, and in many cases saddling the railways with 30 years of locomotive exchange and slower journey times. Transit times over the electrified section were only incidentally increased.

Only passenger services have endured to this day, driven as they have by urban growth rather than a preference for rail transport. Services beyond Pakenham have been de-electrified. The traffic for which it was electrified has not only reduced, it has completely disappeared. Not only was the electrification technology the wrong tech – but even the traffic was disappearing at the time they thought it was appearing, as people no longer needed brown coal briquettes for domestic and industrial use. Ironically, electricity itself was one of the causes for this displacement of briquette technology, as was natural gas which the government was promoting in parallel.

The 1980s saw the third burst of electrification – sadly, a rehash of the 1950s. This cements for me, how Australian rail planners not only make mistakes, but make the same mistakes again and again. Driven by the same resource boom mentality of the 1950s, the same responses were selected – electrify over conventional rail tracks, swap locomotives at the boundary, which was often a political or operational boundary rather than a natural limit to traffic. Mineral haulage estimates and fuel prices were again exaggerated and not achieved- and the benefits of improved diesel technology pre-empted.

In Queensland at least there was a singular advance, through the use of high voltage AC electrification. This was potentially available in the 1950s however was not quite mature enough in its use in Europe to be available here with few risks. For passenger services especially there was concern about reducing the scale of transforming equipment to fit onto a conventional multiple unit carriage in the early days – issues well resolved by the 1970s.

Queensland also made some attempt to reduce transit times by realignment but this exposed the issue somewhat – that the considerable cost of electrification might have been spent on more realignment, both in Queensland and NSW, and delivered measurable benefits in energy costs (through shorter, quicker, flatter journeys) and other benefits of transit time and reduced loco crewing, without the capital costs of wire and a dedicated fleet of electric rollingstock.

The criticism is particularly damning in NSW. Here, the case for improved passenger services was stronger due to urbanisation. However, lessons from Europe or Japan were not heeded – the availability of dual voltage rollingstock for example, the desirability of major realignments or new routes if real market share in passenger transport were to be achieved. Or the potential to build fast, comfortable and even tilting rollingstock to serve diesel lines (which in one sense already existed with the XPT, misused as it was on long distance slow journeys). A whole generation of 160km/h DMUs such as now exist with the Velocity in Victoria, was a technology available in Europe in the 1980s. Route improvements, such as deviations near Newcastle around the Awaba-Fassifern-Teralba area, or a reinstatement of older routes on the Illawarra, might have been more realistic. In Queensland, no new DMUs have been built since the 2000 class in the 1960s. A belated program of realignments, commenced again in the 2000s, has seen route improvements in Queensland that could have been facilitated 20 years earlier.

Like the 1950s, much of the 1980s has been unwound. Electric traction has disappeared from Emerald (another political and operational outpost, rather than a traffic-mandated one) and the Gladstone Gympie section and the Rocklands to Rockhampton section are down to one electric passenger train a day. The Illawarra network is down to the bare-bones passenger service to Kiama and Port Kembla, and the Newcastle one restricted to the Sydney to Newcastle passenger line.

It would be my contention that if route and transit improvements drive market share and density, and density then drives electrification, we might have had a more virtuous circle of dieselisation leading to route improvement leading to more traffic leading to electrification, rather than the path that was actually followed, which I would call “premature electrification”.

But with the pendulum in the UK, a lag-adopter by European standards, now swinging back to electrification, let’s look at the drivers and challenges for such an approach on conventional Australian mainlines (which I define as routes with general freight and a mix of long distance and local passenger traffic).

Traffic densities are not predicated around distance from capital (nor distance hauled) in Australia. Heavy hauls are seen on the lines north west from Newcastle as far as Narrabri but only one freight a day goes to Bomaderry. You will see a much lower amount of traffic at Virginia, within the suburban area of Adelaide, than you will see at Blackwater in rural Queensland. Even passenger densities are arbitrary, as explains a good service frequency to Lithgow ahead of a poor service frequency to Stony Point, albeit the opportunities to realise density gains are greater on the latter route.

Even the percentage of a traffic’s distance hauled indicates little. For example, using Stony Point as the example, the broad gauge haul from Dynon to Long Island is electrified most of the distance, from the Dynon area to Frankston. As a discrete haul (the load is transhipped) this line could be easily electrified, providing an electric passenger service to Hastings (most of the traffic) and a potentially faster, quieter and less polluting option within the suburbs. Of course, no such service is provided. Even traffics entirely ‘under the wire’ are no longer provided with electric haulage, for example, the Owanyilla woodchips were provided with electric traction to start with, but no longer.

Comparing the UK with Australia we need to examine the following benefits and challenges:
-capital cost
–sovereign debt financing
–construction cost
-operational cost
–fuel or energy
–incidental costs of swapping rollingstock and maintenance
-flexibility of rollingstock deployment
-traffic density
-higher speed of rollingstock
-incidental transit time improvements to route
-improved ‘image’ of electric rail

First, the capital cost is a ‘dead weight’ on any comparison of electric versus non-electric, and puts every other possible improvement ‘behind’ which we saw especially in Queensland. This is made up of two costs – public finance costs and construction costs.

Public finance is subject to a multitude of paradoxes – such as how the UK with a sovereign debt around 100% of GDP is able to offer low interest rates than Australia with only 16% (and with Malcolm Turnbull screaming blue murder about it!). One of the paradoxes is explained by the home country bias: people will lend to their own sovereign at cheaper rates than others, irrespective of the actual risks. That is how Japan has managed to stay in business at all – with Japanese people lending money for free to their governments.

Of course that in turn is answered by two realistic explanations – that people are in fact paying for all the economic stimulation their governments do, to protect their jobs and develop their countries – by subsidising their national borrowings. Secondly, they have some influence, through the political system of their own country on how it is spent and paid back. Equity, rather than debt. No Japanese voter can influence how another country’s government spends or repays.

Unlike Japan, Australia is a debtor nation. It is not the government debt causing interest rates to be above world levels, but private debt. Australia’s private economy is seen as too much of a risk, too dependent on low-value-adding industry and not much depth. And for Australian governments two risks: having to effectively underwrite private debt, but also having limited ability, though the income and consumption tax system, to pay off loans quickly, because our income and consumption tax bases are low by developed world standards. Hence worthwhile government expenditure is deferred, while unsustainable investments in housing construction and company acquisition (reducing the pool of economic talent further) are the preference.

This would explain Australian government’s fetish with being the ‘model debtor’ to the world – to make up for the private sector’s failure to generate sufficient wealth within our borders. A perverse sort of “crowding out” where private sector demand crowds out the public sector.

The long and the short of it is, a total project cost over 30 years at 6% is going to cost Australia far more to finance than the UK, dollar for dollar (pound for pound).

Looking at construction costs, this is a hobbyhorse of great age. The expertise and some of the equipment for electrification is highly traded and mobile. However, at the risk of overlapping with the sovereign debt argument, the real consideration is not traded prices but purchasing power parity (PPP) – what does it cost in terms of local opportunities foregone to pay for these projects, not the actual price.

While currencies move dramatically around conditions and whims (for example, the AUD:GBP rate has gone from 3:1 to 2:1 in a very short time). For actual traded goods, this can provide windfall gains and losses very quickly. For example, a UK electrification contractor might find a move to the Australian market very lucrative when reported in their own currency at present. It might change if we return to earlier levels. However, PPP rates do not change markedly over time because the economic fundamentals and the scarcity costs of all the different goods and services WITHIN the domestic economy do not change quickly. So the general labour cost of electrification workers in Australia is lower than the UK and will remain that way for some time. However, specialist workers are in high demand and Australia does not produce enough for itself – we pay over the odds for these people.

The real cost drivers are the lack of constant work (boosting the fixed costs of design and project establishment, equipment acquisition and recruitment), variable costs not able to be spread over large projects (long km lengths), and our sovereign debt rates.

Looking at fuel/energy costs it may actually favour diesel in the UK, as the electricity costs are higher than here, while diesel is actively traded around the world. I’m unclear on UK taxation of fuels as a business input, so won’t say anything more about it.

From our point of view, any differentials in prices in Australia must be artificial, we are a net energy exporter albeit an importer of petroleum products. I do not see energy price or security issues affecting the equation either way – it would come down to a simple fuel efficiency equation – does the generation of electricity and its transmission to the point of use, being cheaper than supplying that energy as liquid fuel, overcome the cost difference between a locomotive generating its own electricity, and the locomotive which doesn’t and therefore relies on lineside transmission and delivery equipment.

Both energy sources have extensive and established supply chains – liquid fuels via private supply and delivery, electricity via transmission networks. The main difference is the railways have to supply a ‘to the railhead’ electricity supply system, whereas a tank or 2 of distillate at a few depots is all that it takes to keep a diesel locomotive fuelled – the supplier does the rest.

Incidental costs including loco exchange and extra maintenance can be a killer. To minimise the amount of loco swapping – the electrification scheme needs to reach the limits of the traffic, not the limits of a political region or former rail operational base.

NSW readers will recall what happened with Lithgow. The scheme was supposed to reach Wallerawang and the mines in that area, so that end to end haulage (mine to power station or export loader) could take place with a single set of locomotives. However when the cost of the entire scheme got excessive they terminated it at Lithgow, a rail depot that had been located not because of its coal deposits or traffic, but because it marked the end of a difficult section of rail. As well it had become a large town in its own right – making reaching there a political imperative as much as an operational one – but ignoring the actual traffic to be hauled.

For the saving of maybe 5% of the total project cost by truncating the service at Lithgow/Bowenfels (which obviated a tunnel enlargement) the line was condemned to 30 years of needless locomotive exchange to reach destinations only 5% extra distance beyond from the end of the wire.

Too many other examples abounded in Australian electrification – traffics out of unwired sidings or branches which undermined the whole rationale for the electrification. Metropolitan Colliery, Sulphide works, Newstan/Eraring/Vales Point, Maryvale paper, Holmview cattle siding and the Ebenezer Colliery would all be a good place to start. They were unable to even wire to the gates of Goninan in Broadmeadow.

And its never clear just how many sidings are required to be wired. Most yards have a siding or crossover that’s hardly used, but is kept just in case. But unwired, it becomes unusable without a shunting loco kept on site, another cost.

And keeping diesels ‘around’ increases the likelihood they will be used, and the electrification scheme becomes steadily redundant. In Victoria, for example, they turned off the Latrobe Valley electrification every Sunday. With low service levels and a more efficient freight service actually provided on Sunday than during the week (for example, a Sunday Bairnsdale train could run right through without loco change) – the incentive to keep the wired service was reduced.

This also points to flexibility, another opportunity cost of electrification. This is fairly self-evident, but has become all the more so with generic body designs for passenger rollingstock, where the power unit is the only difference between diesel and electric. Think of the Rockhampton and Cairns Tilt Trains, for example.

Freight haulage today will depend on how well electrification maximises the heavy hauls, and the extent to which overhead wiring limits payload space, for example, trailer on flat car or double stacked containers. It is possible to install traction wires at heights that allow for double stacking – it has not been seen as important in Australia to date to do this – and many of the clearance adjustments undertaken in electrification schemes have been ‘barely enough’ to squeeze a pantograph down above the roofline of a conventional locomotive or wagon/carriage body.

Heavy haulage should be the domain of the electric locomotive. It was troubling that the 86 class running on low voltage DC electrification, though notionally rated a more powerful locomotive than the 81 class diesel of the same generation of purchases, was in practice limited to the capacity of the supply system installed. When 2-locomotive coal trains of 30 odd wagons was the norm, the difference was not evident. When trains double that length started to appear, the 4×86 combination was trumped by a 3×81 combination – a 33% improvement in locomotive productivity. As I understand it, high voltage AC locomotives tend to avoid this power drop.

Traffic density is now the key determinant from the need side of the equation. Tractive effort, which used to give electric locomotives a clear lead over steam, is no longer such an advantage against diesel locomotives. Higher speed (facilitated by lighter weight and track impact at speed) only favours electric at the top of the speed range (typically above 220km/h). Underground operation favours electric but with the cost of underground rail many times greater than above ground, any savings from the use electric traction will be marginal to the overall decision.

It is no surprise density is a key factor in a renaissance of mainline electrification in the UK. We are not talking population density, though that is part of it. We are talking traffic density, especially what I would call general intercity traffic – journeys from settlements of all sizes to others for business, for visiting friends and relatives and so on, not merely for the daily work journey or for welfare.

Because this traffic can be very non-specific (not focussed on a handful of large centres like in Australia) it is not easily amenable to replacement by grand high speed rail schemes, as in France. It is closer to the German example.

Any move to a renaissance of long distance passenger rail in Australia would more closely mirror the French example – justified by a few large cities, and the needs of smaller settlements en route or elsewhere would be irrelevant. It is hard to imagine for example, a journey from Wagga to Bathurst being of any great import to a decision to improve passenger rail in Australia. In Germany, however, two cities of 50,000 would be just the market for the sorts of journeys that network does well.

Mainline electrification has seen what I would call incidental improvements in transit speed. This is distinguished from design improvements, which might involve faster locomotives, rollingstock, track or signalling. Some of this can be regarded as consequent on catching up on deferred maintenance.’

It was noticeable that apart from the presence of overhead masts and wire, the 1950s and 1980s electrification schemes showed precious little evidence of the whole rail line being upgraded to meet modern requirements. The track and signalling often was unchanged from before electrification, except in some cases were track recircuiting required the signalling to be modernised.

Incidental improvements in transit time also came from the greater power on the hills, and quicker recovery from stops. OS Nock, in his seminal Railways of Australia, gave the example of the U-Sets in the Blue Mountains running the same timetable up the hill and down. This was not the case with the steam-hauled local trains they replaced!

Higher speeds should be possible from rolling stock, given two advantages of electrification. Opportunities to distribute power throughout the train, reducing axle loads from locomotives. Electrification allows EMU designs to be developed where high power to weight is achieved, compared with diesel equivalents. Higher torque allows power to be picked up quickly and applied to moving the train to cruising speed. Electric locomotives can also provide peak bursts of power, in excess of the continuous power rating, that can be used to start a train rolling to high speed, with lower power required to keep it at high speeds. This mechanism allows TGVs to develop 5 digit kw output for a short time to reach 300km/h, but not have to sustain it as the train has considerable momentum.

The case for electrification is often made by pointing the elusive preference people have for it. I would distill this into a few discrete factors: Electrification is often accompanied by new rollingstock and station upgrades, hence an association in the public mind with it being more desirable.

Because electrification requires higher traffic densities, a plan to increase traffic densities may occur concurrently with electrification, and the two become conflated. For example, post electrification, Nambour, Newcastle, Wollongong, Kiama and countless other places have better services. However, Ballarat and Bendigo also have considerably better services, as does Traralgon, which has more services now than it did when wired. Maitland and Nowra manage with excellent (for their size) diesel passenger services than are unlikely to see electrification.

And electrification may not presage the way to better service. Sunbury is not on the line to Geelong, but Sunbury definitely points the way to Geelong. One is currently unhappy and the other definitely would be. Because electrification has become conflated, in Victorian minds, with an inferior quality of service, with uncomfortable rollingstock, delays, strikes, lack of staff presence and social undesirables. Of course overhead wires and substations have nothing to do with this; but just as a good image can become conflated, so can a bad one. Some rail enthusiasts, who passionately advocate for electric services to places like Geelong, fail to see this.

Finally the environmental argument should win it for electrification, but often doesn’t. Coal fired, especially brown coal fired electricity might only move the pollution from city to powerstation. Renewable sources will clean up the emissions, however an empty train is still wasteful, taking renewable power in the grid from other industries who might have had a better use for it.

The most environmentally friendly thing a train can do is be full. A full train represents car or truck journeys not made, and improves at the margin, ie the marginal wagon or carriage will represent less of an impost on the environment than the ones before it, but draw cars and trucks away that had a constant rate of damage. But an empty train is wasteful. Socially, environmentally and economically.

So how and in what circumstances can Australia benefit from mainline rail electrification?

Given the limitations I’ve mentioned above, some key points are:

-the scope of the electrification must fit around a traffic, not a set of political or operational end points. Ending schemes at the modern equivalents of Lithgow or Rockhampton is doomed. The synergies of Glenlee for freight, and Campbelltown for passengers are the right way to go – the Ebenezer/Rosewood scheme the wrong way to go.

-if the traffic is high value, high volume passenger traffic, then possible mainline electrification is not the way to go, but to build a whole new line, which in probability will also be electrified. Mandurah and Bunbury are pointing the way. If Bunbury is worth having a passenger service, it will be worth having a high speed one, with new fast corridor, dedicated stock and electrification. Not a tacked-on arrangement on the existing route, dodging the slower freights. If it is not worth a new route, it is probably not worth doing.

-traffic density rather than haulage capability or speed are the most realistic options in Australia. If speed becomes make or break, as in high speed intercity rail, then electrification will be favoured. If it isn’t make or break, for example, in the case of Geelong or Sunbury, where rail is already faster than road on point to point (but not door to door) then electrification will make no difference. If however a 220km/h diesel train from Sydney to Canberra was simply not able to beat an aircraft end-to-end, but a 300km/h electric train could – then the case would be clear.

And to justify electrification would require the sorts of suburban densities we see now – out on the mainlines. We may yet see them in some places, for example, between Sydney and Brisbane, or between Sydney and Narrabri/Ulan. If Narrabri/Ulan electrification fortuitously provided a suburban service to Maitland that only required the short section to Telarah wired, then great. However, I can’t see that benefit without coal haulage driving it.

A proper carbon price might skew some of the decisions in favour of electrification, as with peak oil. However, to build the case for rail being a good environmental citizen, it needs to focus on core efficiencies – relieving congestion in the cities, including going underground if need be; hauling the big hauls on the rural mainlines; and possibly providing an alternative to air travel between the closer large cities on the coast. That way, it will kick the big goals against the other modes and develop a market share large enough to justify the electrification that will make a virtuous circle complete.

Whatever his motives, he draws out some interesting comments about how lobbying in the federal sphere is dominated by those industries regulated by the Commonwealth – media, pharmaceuticals and so on, while state lobbying is dominated by the big developers who stand to gain or lose from state-level regulation.’

He then goes on to suggest that if all that regulation wasn’t there, then the lobbying would go away – and hence the distortions to a popular vote.

This analysis overlooks some superficial weaknesses. What is government for? Saying you will not pass laws because people might try to improperly influence you over the nature of these laws, seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater at the very least – at worst you could even argue that it is an arguement for an anarchical existence or a dictatorship. And there would be simpler remedies, like campaign limits, public funding rather than the baby and bathwater option.

But let’s explore further what an urban non-planning regime might look like with no urban planning laws, and hence no reason for developers to influence, properly or otherwise.

Urban development is regulated in a number of dimensions. Uses – what the land is used for. Heritage – keeping old stuff for its significance, rarity or contribution to a ‘look’. Other environmental outcomes – pollution, light and shade. Transport outcomes such as traffic and congestion. Morals – brothels and so on. Materials and finish – the look of quality and permanence, and suitability for purpose. Safety – fitness for habitation, evacuation and combustion in case of fires. To suffice, many, many regulations for many reasons. Extracting government from this field, or even aiming for alternatives to achieve the same outcomes, would be a phenomenal task.

And why seek alternatives? Most of these regulations, in classical economics, aim to address market failure – unpriced externalities, positive social benefits that the market cannot achieve, information failures and so on.

Regulations carry deadweight losses and maybe some of the alternatives might tread more lightly – for example, don’t force owners to have fire escapes, but make them display a safety rating outside the building at less cost – and leave it to those entering the building to exercise their choice to do so.

So it is not even clear that an unregulated market is even as efficient as a regulated one (net of the costs of regulation).

So what are some examples of lighter regulation. Demographia are always promoting the experience of Houston, USA in lightly regulating. Interestingly, this tends to overwhelmingly focus on the ex-urban experience, converting farmland to suburbs, rather than converting established suburbs or brownfields sites into medium or high density residential or commercial uses.

They recommend a free-market with the old common law covenants, used to ensure that houses in developments do not later find someone next door building something they don’t like. This places a right of veto to potentially undesirable developments, with none of the negatives associated with government involvement – because any dispute would be between two private parties, and settled in court. The government has no role.

This is superficially attractive, but let’s look at some potential complications. First, if a developer can buy plot A and the plots immediately around it, it could then build foreseeably a 100 storey tower on plot A. Others contiguous not with A but the circle of plots around it might have no standing in court, because these plots are ‘buffers’ and might not have an objectionable use (for example, remaining normal houses, but owned by the owner of A) or are left empty.

Second, large parts of the city may not have any covenants in place. Who will put them in? Sellers are the ones who can add covenants to contracts of sale – but they lower the price and the seller, who is often moving out of the area, may not care what becomes of the area. They are fine in the case of original greenfield developments, but what about established older areas.

And what about a genuine free-for-all? Of course this was the way in olden times, where a ferrier might be shoeing horses next to a suburban house, next to a tannery and next to a church-run orphanage. A poorer and simpler world often had more other things to worry about than incompatible land uses and urban amenity.

And in those days, schemes, such as we saw, were generally the ruler either fairly or unjustly acquiring the property around the palace, flattening it and building wide boulevards and open squares, to the glory of the ruler, the city and country. From Paris to Turin to Beijing, the method was similar. In those cases where it was done fairly, it provided an alternative approach to the use of laws; it was the use of state funds to achieve the outcomes. And of course if the ruler had, speculator style, improved the amenity of land in the scheme or nearby which he owned, he might make a tidy sum. Urban renewal has deep roots.

And this approach is not so different to what the developer might do in Houston, faced with covenants. Essentially they are buying out the land and the covenant objections as well. Using their wealth to overcome all objections, even those founded in common law practice so favoured by rightwing ideologues.

But let’s imagine we had a genuine free-for-all today. Not even troubled by covenants. If you truly believe in market forces, then you would get a city ordered by the market. But how would this really address the far-right’s objectives? Power and influence would still be concentrated in city centres, as it always was.

Concentric rings (von Thuenen style) would generally appear, based on convenience, transport costs. Urban redevelopment might come as ‘floods’ in each zone: as each seller decides to sell to someone higher up the value chain (eg a single house owner selling to an apartment builder) the neighbours will all come under pressure to do the same. Some might hold out against the change but they would be wasting their own money, and losing amenity. Remembering all prices are relative – the general price level in the economy will rise to make what the ‘winners’ receive the norm, and what the losers continue to get will no longer be enough.

And the market failures mentioned above would compound the failure of this non-intervention policy. Congestion, pollution, lack of safety to name the most obvious. Maybe he means that you tackle these failures directly through other means, for example, congestion charging, pollution trading, public information campaigns. But didn’t sound like the tone of his column – it seemed  to be a call for a retreat of government on all fronts.

Now this post is not to suggest that the developer lobbying situation does not need addressing; it definitely does. And the laws could do with considerable simplification and making transparent in their operation. BUt their outright removal is not just undesirable, it might not actually achieve anything close to the fantasies of the Right: a liberated lower-middle class able to indulge its cultural preference in the suburban fringe.

Costello would need to be careful to not get exactly what he wishes for, it might look very different from what he imagines.

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?

Caravanning-oz.com pic of wheat silo

Are for bulk grains like wheat.

Paul Mees, in his recent submission to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Train Services, appended his paper Does Melbourne need another central city rail tunnel? which reminded me, when I read it, of why I went into the business (or hobby) of pushing the rail political barrel so hard and for so long. I read his earlier book Very Public Solution and I had always been struck by the conclusions – which had floated in my own head for so long but had not been given voice publicly anywhere I had read – from the pro-rail community or left-leaning advocates to the pro-road, anti-left lobbies and institutions. Even dry old transport academia had tended to lean one way or the other, with few clear and original views being touted.

And these positions tended to mark out public transport, and rail-transport in particular, as fighting a rear-guard action against an overwhelming pressure from ‘economically-rational’ interests. And some of this pressure seemed rational enough – services and lines losing money, empty of people, wasting resources. People preferred cars. However, the Australian experience was flying in the face of overseas experience, which even into the 1970s and 80s was seeing a massive swing to public transport – or rail transport, with investment, increasing ridership, better political ownership of the issue.

We had our “we’re different” crowd who seemed to materialise from both sides of the argument – not just the anti-rail side who might have been expected to push this. Even the pro-rail camp seemed to be averse to reading the lessons of overseas in a clear light and which set out exactly what sort of outcomes to expect where an overseas operation delivered similar rollingstock, similar fare levels between settlements of similar size and density.

Until I read Mees Very Public Solution, I found very few advocates on either side who were prepared to venture that overseas lessons could be in most  cases implemented ‘off-the-shelf’to achieve similar results.

Or even not-so-similar results. Some Australian networks achieve a small percentage of the ridership or share outcomes of similar sized transport networks overseas,  with no obvious reason.

Mees pointed to the experience of Melbourne and Toronto. Two similar sized cities, both with low density and pro-car culture (and before someone challenges me on this, I will rhetorically ask them if they have been to Toronto. I have. Until you’ve seen Freeway 401 and North American-scale cars they drive on it, you cannot tell me Toronto is not a car-oriented city. And all the people I spoke to in suburban Markham had never been on a train or bus in Toronto).

Mees copped his detractors too, ostensibly from the side that should have supported him – the rail and bus operators. Rail operators, you would expect, would welcome his findings that operating a high-frequency, simplified rail operation would produce the best results. More, and reasoned voices to the argument for more public funding to achieve this result, you would think.

And his call for a tight grid network of buses operating all civilised hours would also be welcomed by bus operators. You would think the little private bus empires would be keen for another voice to push for the increase in funding, and hence expansion in the number of vehicles and staffing that it would require.

But no, he probably copped it greater, and from both sides, than if he had been just another voice in one camp or the other. Metaphorically, the Middle East peace negotiator, shot as he arrives at the negotiating table, a threat to both sides perhaps?

One thing that has always fascinated me is the personal motivations of those who resent new opinions and voices in a long running debate; and I believe in rail/public transport there are some deep psycho-social issues that lay behind that. I’ll leave that topic for another day.

In his submission to Parliament Mees rests on two solid conclusions – that the rear guard action that his spearhead is fighting, comes from the concept of “self-defence of incompetence”, which another academic developed. And that a single integrated authority covering all modes would be the real solution to the problem.

The self defence of incompetence arises from the poor competence of employees, who Mees conjectures have filled the system since privatisation (although I don’t believe he blames privatisation per se for this problem) and the departure of competent employees, with the technical skills and corporate memory. Certainly, compared to the field I work in (another controversial area of public administration) it is hard to believe the loss of technical and institutional memory that transport has been through.

The system, Mees suggests, actively builds on its own previous ‘bogus’ defences of incompetence until people start believing their own ‘bogusness’.

However, Mees moves onto ground that could undermine his own argument when he posits that Connex and the DoT have develop a reciprocal backside-covering arrangement when presumably if a) the system has been underfunded and therefore Connex would be right to blame DoT or b) the operator is incompetent, and hence DoT would be right to blame Connex or c) both of the above, in which case they could both blame each other.

But we end up with d) they both lie to protect each other when one or both know the true causes of failure, which are never made public.

And before someone rushes to criticise my use of the word ‘lie’ I would ask – suppose I had said they were only ‘very badly mistaken’. It might have been more diplomatic or less personal – but would it have itself been a ‘very badly mistaken’ understanding of their veracity or otherwise.

These people are paid hundreds of millions of dollars collectively; are we to believe a situation presents itself and they are ‘very badly mistaken’ about what it was, or what caused it? I could accept a mistake here or there by an individual or two. A minister misreads his briefing note in Parliament; or a clerk mistypes a figure into a database; an adviser mishears an explanation over a mobile phone from a rail yard. But a whole team of media advisers, Division heads and PR hacks write these documents, they would either by writing them in complete isolation from the facts, or they have the facts and are not writing them.

The problem is I suspect an integrated transport authority would only lead to more of this, and Mees would need to explain better how such an authority would actually work, and build a positive culture. Deckchairs and iceberg-penetrated ocean liners spring to mind.

Mees presents the Zurich public transport authority as a model but presents it as if we haven’t been down this street before. Sydney had the “Public Transport Commission” from 1972 to 1980, operating rail, buses (but not private buses) and ferries while Brisbane briefly had the Metropolitan Transport Authority in the mid 1970s. Perth has had “Transperth” since the mid 1980s and Adelaide had the State Transport Authority since the late 1970s, though this has been operationally loosened with the privatisation of buses and Transadelaide keeping trains and tram.

In Mees home town the Metropolitan Transit Authority was created in 1983 and ran under that guise until the early 1980s, when it was replaced with the Public Transport Corporation (adding in country services) until privatisation.

The MTA or Met as it was branded, had rail, tram and bus divisions, and the suburban rail was fairly well institutionally separated from the country and freight rail operator, hence it wasn’t just a new lick of paint.

The Met did not cover itself in glory, in fact it was probably one of the worst times in Melbourne’s public transport history, almost as bad as the summer of 2009. Those who were there remember Lou Di Gregorio and the week-long strikes, “Snappy Tom” Roper, Jim Kennan and the scratch tickets, and the 7:17 from Ringwood (which almost never ran). They remember the editorial of the Sun News Pictorial (predecessor to the H-S) wanting the whole system ripped up and replaced with freeways.

No-one familiar with the Sydney situation could point to any good coming from the Public Transport Commission, the period of the slashing of rail services, Granville, and the trains being painted blue over the top of their stainless steel. Certainly I don’t recall a renaissance of public transport planning and coordination during this period. Arguably the early State Rail Authority days, when the PTC was desolved, were better.

So the burden on Mees would be to better explain how an integrated transport authority might avoid this. And how we might be more ‘Swiss’.

Most calls for ‘integration’ relate to the benefits of silo-busting. What is a silo? Management studies gurus will know the answer – it refers to organisational structures which encourage communication and accountability running vertically, from the shop floor through Division and Branch heads to the top. Because people only answer for their work and for their performance to the guy on top, the only person who will see the entire perspective, for example, what the customer experiences, is the CEO. And because he/she is a long way away in a corporate office, in effect no-one sees in the organisation the effect on the customer – what the customer gets, or pays for.

And a customer experience is very multi-faceted in the provision of public transport.

The customer will experience variously across their journey – the asset/infrastructure, vehicles, ticketing equipment and revenue collection, the provision of information both fixed and in real time, the experience of safety and comfort, and because transport is about a change in geography, the customer sees how things are done ‘differently’ according the geography, sometimes more than the staff see (because they might be limited to one location or route).

For example, a customer could travel from St Ives to Sydney, via a private bus to Turramurra, a Cityrail train and walking along the city streets. Arguably the NSW Transport Minister sits across the top of this journey; noone else does. The journey requires 2 separate tickets and therefore revenue streams, which never meet. The two vehicles are owned, maintained and driven by vastly different staff working for different silos.

The station facility is provided by Cityrail. If they’ve thought to accommdate the bus in the design of the facility, it would be the exception rather than the norm. The timetabling, if it is done at all, would be by a third silo in a distant building, remote from the reality of what’s happening.

Even walking along the city streets is the responsibility of the City of Sydney, who doubtless are not responsible for how pedestrians flow into the station complexes, way people direct themselves on common journeys to popular destinations and so on.

Measuring the performance of the whole would be patchy or non-existent. A passenger’s journey time could vary widely according to the reliability of the interchange between bus and train; a process that does not actually have a person responsible for it occuring.

I’ve developed a matrix that helps us to understand how multimodal public transport might be integrated, both by aspect of integration, and depth of integration.

 Click to enlarge.

And no matter how clever Steve Crabb or Philip Shirley were in painting their vehicles all the same colour – integration is not about paint on vehicles, but about the extent to which the factors listed above are managed. By accident, by design or by a tight end-to-end view of what the customer actually experiences.

I’ve marked on the matrix some code letter positions as I would welcome comments below on whether certain integrations could be placed in alternative positions from the ones I’ve chosen.

On the vertical axis are the cumulative achievements of potential integration. Branding is the easiest, hence its position as the lowest possible achievement of integration. On the horizontal axis is my own assessment of the evidence for that. Because the vertical position assumes cumulative achievement, it therefore assumes the integration items below have already been well achieved. This is not always going to be so clear cut. However  it would be rare for an organisation to achieve only the minimum on something like branding or ticketing – but to have a well-founded performance measurement system that is fully integrated. The reverse is possible, as in Melbourne, with zonal multi-modal ticketing and a single brand for marketing public transport (Metlink) but neglible effort to measure the performance of the system as a whole.

In the final column, I’ve put the question that will guide users to better decide whether the achievement has been met.

The lower achievements are fairly self-explanatory but the higher ones won’t be.

Let’s look first at performance measurement. Some of the sins of existing non-integrated systems include: measuring a train+bus journey as two separate journeys (this is common), measuring mode performance to the end of the mode, notwithstanding that a vehicle has missed a connection, either by accident on the day, or by design of the timetable. Another is to measure customer satisfaction with one mode only, knowing full well that the passenger’s overall satisfaction will be lower if a connecting mode fails to deliver.

What is process management? I first ran into the concept from Paul Walsh who taught at UNSW. It grew out of business process reengineering – a concept which aimed to avoid “paving over the cow paths” as Hammer and Champy put, but to design new processes that reduced cost, time and effort, often using automation. Walsh had a different take – it wasn’t so crucial to process efficiency the number of steps or how long they took, but whether someone was accountable for it. End to end, from the customer’s point of view.

If all the key interfaces were being managed, for example, the McDonalds manager was watching not just the burgers being made but the order being given and the finished burger being given to the paying customer as quickly as possible, then business process management was taking place. If not, you were probably seeing silo-based management – with the kitchen manager winning awards potentially for the fastest made hamburger in history, but the finished product sitting waiting to be given to the customer because another silo, the shopfront staff, not doing their jobs. If the kitchen manager is not accountable for that, and that would be a reasonable expectation, then it is no surprise that it doesn’t happen. As they say, what gets measured gets done.

In public transport, who is actually accountable for the customer experience? The depot manager getting trains or buses ready for the day? The driver (or signaller in the case of railways?) The ticket seller? The station staff? The Line Manager in head office? The person who wrote the timetables? The guy installing concrete sleepers in the track? It is duff to say “all of them” because you cannot hold “all of them” to account.

Who is accountable if the bus misses its train connection? If the two tickets are incompatible? If the bus has nowhere to pull up safely at the rail station? If the customer, just off the train, doesn’t know where the bus is? The station assistant might well say “Don’t ask me, I only work for the railways” but that could be a perfectly reasonable explanation, it isn’t part of his training, he doesn’t get in trouble for saying that – and he’ll still get paid whether or not that customer continues to use PT. So who is accountable?

To come back to Mees – I think he needs to build the bridge between his public advocacy of an integrated transport authority – and the reality that in Australia this has often not produced much more than single tickets and single signage. Even basics like integrated bus-rail facilities are only seen in a few places, for example, Perth. Route planning and substitution is not done, for example, in Brisbane, the BCC buses and QR are in competition, not just at a route level but even for major infrastructure development. In Sydney what baby steps were achieved towards integration had been rewound, and the system improved for it. That needs some explanation/