Commuters will hop onto Australia’s first high-speed trains in just 12 years if the latest proposal for the nation’s rail network leaves the station.
Stretching almost 200km from Newcastle to Sydney, newly released details have the long-touted line being built in three in stages with the final section opening in 2042.
Infrastructure Australia recommended pushing ahead with the plan in its evaluation of a business case, which the Albanese government has been sitting on since the High Speed Rail Authority finished it in 2024.
The nation-building project would ultimately allow passengers to travel between the two most populous NSW cities at up to 320km/h, cutting the travel time from Newcastle to Sydney more than two-and-a-half hours to one hour.
Six stations would be built in total. The first stage, encompassing Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the Central Coast, would be delivered in 2037, while the second stage, between Central Coast and Sydney Central, would be finished in 2039.
A third section, linking Central to Parramatta and the soon-to-be-opened Western Sydney Airport, would open in 2042.
Most of the route – almost 60 per cent or about 115km – would be tunnelled, making slower speeds necessary.
“Given the large amount of tunnelling and the new rail systems, we expect costs to vary considerably as design maturity improves,” the evaluation report said, noting it was not yet possible to make a confident assessment on the proposal’s cost-benefit ratio.
The former NSW coalition government began developing a high-speed rail proposal from Newcastle to Sydney before dropping the plans ahead of the 2023 election, after spending $100 million on feasibility studies.
NSW Premier Chris Minns was not enthusiastic when asked on Thursday about the project’s feasibility without federal backing.
“The federal government’s got way, way deeper pockets than NSW. If it’s an initiative they want to pursue, it’s great for NSW, I’m not going to stand in their way,” he told reporters.
But federal Transport and Infrastructure Minister Catherine King welcomed the plan, describing it as a “nation-shaping investment”.
“It will unlock housing, create employment opportunities in the regions and enable our ambitious carbon reduction targets to be achieved,” a spokesperson for Ms King said in a statement.
“The government is committed to progressing high speed rail, which has proven its ability overseas to bring people and places closer together.”
The High Speed Rail Authority seeks Commonwealth funding to progress the design work, secure planning approvals and refine cost estimates for the first two stages.
The Albanese government has already committed $500 million to planning work for the project. More work is needed to determine a final cost but it is likely to run into at least tens of billions of dollars.
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