The high speed rail you get, when you have no high speed rail

By Peter Roberts

Infrastructure minister Catherine King has announced the appointments to the Board of the High Speed Rail Authority after a ‘merit-based process.

According to a statement: “This process has resulted in a Board comprising the appropriate skills, qualifications, knowledge and experience to best bring high-speed rail to reality.”

While the new board is highly qualified, I would just like to have seen someone nominated from a country that actually builds and runs a lot of high speed rail.

By this I mean Japan of course, most of Europe, Korea and Taiwan in our region and, of course, China.

In China 2,800 pairs of bullet trains run daily connecting over 550 cities and covering 33 of the country’s 34 provinces.

However after our merit-based selection system we have two people with experience in the United Kingdom and three from Australia.

Chair is Ms Jill Rossouw, Executive Director, Infrastructure at IFM Investors and a Board member of the Port of Brisbane.

Other board members are:

• Ms Dyan Crowther OBE, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of High Speed One (HS1) Ltd of the United Kingdom
• Ms Gillian Brown, a director of Ausgrid and a non-executive director of Queensland Investment Corporation)
• Ian Hunt is a non-executive director of Canberra Light Rail and the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds
• And Neil Scales OBE is an experienced infrastructure leader and was most recently the Director-General of the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads. He was formerly the CEO of Translink and the Director-General of Merseytravel in the UK.

Now they are all excellent people, don’t get me wrong, but the only actual high speed rail experience is with UK’s HS1, which is a tiny 109 mile rail line between St Pancras International in London and the Channel Tunnel.

And this being @AuManufacturing, could we have had someone who builds trains or the myriad of other equipment that goes to make up a high-speed rail network?

Hunt I should mention has experience in ‘engineering and project management’.

The UK is now building, or attempting to built HS2 a route linking London and the north of the country, and it has turned into something of a schemozzle.

The projected costs have more than doubled, little has been done on the proposed route north of Birmingham, and sections of a planned network have been cancelled and train orders cut….and we are still in the construction phase.

An example is the Phase 2b route from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds, which now has a top-end forecast of £41bn, 63 percent over budget, as well as a potential seven-year delay.

We don’t want this sort of high-speed rail reality, we want projects on time and budget, or like China – up and running before you can blink an eye.

The first priority of the Authority will be planning and corridor works for the Sydney to Newcastle section of the high-speed rail network, backed by a $500 million commitment from the federal government.

Good luck with that.

Picture: Jill Rossouw