November 23, 2021
Anyone who expected the $15bn Inland Rail project to go smoothly qualified as an incurable optimist.
While there has been admirable progress, to think that such an ambitious piece of nation-building infrastructure could go from announcement in 2017 to completion in 2027 was a tough ask even before such challenges as record rainfall, Covid lockdowns, and travel restrictions reared their heads in 2020.
“It’s a complex and large project, made up of a number of individual sections, each of which involves planning, pre-construction, technical and environmental assessment as well as the extensive stakeholder and community consultations,” says Brad Williams, Australian Logistics Council (ALC) chief executive.
“Like any big project – and this is a massive one – there’s lots of moving pieces and lots of effort to get all that done.
“It was started in 2018, and as far as we understand, it’s still forecast to be completed in 2026.”
But as the dust settles on a Senate Committee’s scathing report into the project, released in August, no one involved is in any doubt that there are serious issues around Inland Rail that need to be addressed; with the management of the northern end point singled-out by the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for particular emphasis.
“It is the committee’s view that the management of the endpoints of the Inland Rail project in Brisbane has been unacceptable,” the report states.
At this point, the project’s northern ending, in the southern Brisbane suburb of Acacia Ridge, is subject to uncertainty as to how freight will move along the “last mile” (in fact, 30km) to and from the Port of Brisbane; in particular, the extent to which freight going on to, and coming off Inland Rail, will share existing rail lines and roads.
With the Queensland and federal governments still investigating the potential double-stack capacity of the railway from Acacia Ridge to the Port of Brisbane, the Senate Committee said it “cannot understand how the Inland Rail project’s intermodal terminal locations in Brisbane are yet to be determined, especially when the original location (Acacia Ridge) formed the basis of the 2015 business case, and the construction of the Inland Rail project has already commenced.”
The committee described it as “a failure of the Australian and Queensland governments for this uncertainty to remain, despite over a decade of investigation into the Inland Rail corridor”.
To big Inland Rail user Pacific National, while the Australian and Queensland governments’ joint initiative to undertake detailed studies to identify and preserve a dedicated future rail freight connection to Port of Brisbane from Acacia Ridge is “welcome”, it is just one important element of settling on an alignment of Inland Rail that can cut the transit time between Melbourne and Brisbane by at least one-third.
“We need an alignment that allows a transit time between Melbourne and Brisbane of less than 24 hours – a trip which can currently take up to 36 hours,” Pacific National chief executive officer Paul Scurrah told an Inland Rail conference in May.
“This helps our sector to compete on a level playing field with road freight.”
Scurrah told the May conference that Pacific National estimated that less than one per cent of containerised freight is hauled by rail between Melbourne and Sydney – the busiest freight corridor by volume (some 20 million tonnes transported each year) in the country – and less than three per cent of containerised freight is hauled by rail between Sydney and Brisbane.
Given that the May conference was told that one of the aims of the Inland Rail project was to transform the proportion of freight carried by rail in Australia from 30 per cent presently to 62 per cent by 2050, Scurrah’s comments left no one in doubt of the scale of the task.
But he also congratulated Australian Rail Track Corporation (ART) for “future-proofing” the design to one day allow the operation of 3.6km-long freight trains, as are used in North America; double-stacked trains of that length will make a dent in road’s dominance.
While the Queensland and federal governments hammer out the preferred arrangement into and out of Brisbane, other parties are putting in thinking time to solve the project’s “missing link”.
PortConnex, a subsidiary of the National Trunk Rail (NTR) consortium, has proposed an intermodal freight hub at Ipswich, to be combined with a 52km underground tunnel system taking rail freight straight to the Port of Brisbane.
NTR chair Martin Albrecht, former managing director of Thiess, outlined the plan in an opinion piece published in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail in October; it would feature driverless, autonomous and fully battery-powered trains offering transport of double-stacked containers, agricultural, resource and livestock freight into the Port of Brisbane, in 60 minutes.
PortConnex says its tunnel plan would eliminate more than 323,000 truck movements – and thus reduce congestion and freight and rail conflicts – as well as being an important step to ensuring that the Melbourne-Brisbane freight turnaround is brought inside 24 hours.
Bringing the Port of Brisbane into play will be crucial to the economics of the freight hubs being built along the Inland Rail system; and breaking the tyranny of the Great Dividing Range will also be music to the ears of the nation’s exporters.
“Obviously, having this huge north-south infrastructure spine should be a huge positive from an agricultural perspective, but to really be effective, we’d like to see as many ports brought into play as we can,” says Ash Salardini, general manager, trade and economics, at the National Farmers Federation (NFF).
“What’s really important to us is having ‘port contestability’, so we actually get a better price for freight.”
At the moment, Salardini says, to get a container of grain to Indonesia from Australia costs the same as getting a container of grain from Canada to Indonesia, despite that being about a 10,000km-longer journey.
“The example I’d give is the northwest of New South Wales,” Salardini continues. “They’re agnostic as to where their grain goes – they’d be very happy to take it down to Newcastle, take it to Brisbane and even to Melbourne, depending on the price they get. It’s really about having that infrastructure in place, and then having the ‘first and last mile’ sorted out as well.
“We’re really happy with Inland Rail, but I think that’s the bit that’s going to be the hardest to do. We want four eastern seaboard ports to be competing with each other for every container of grain.
“With all of the ‘nerves’, the regional links, feeding into the ‘spine’ of Inland Rail, we’re really hoping to see that situation come to fruition.”
At the moment, depending on the year and depending on various prices, as much of the final price of grain goes to transport and logistics as to the farmer in Australia, he says.
“We’d love to see the situation where grain could go from one of our collection hubs straight to a ship,” Salardini says.
“We’re looking for a farmer in the northwest of New South Wales being able to talk to their freight forwarder or, even better yet, go on an app and compare what freight options there are, and get the best deal on the day based on shipping costs, based on port charges, based on stevedoring charges, and landside charges.
“At the moment, that’s not the case; it’s you go where we tell you to go, and that’s your only option.”
Hopefully the Inland Rail addresses that exact issue.
