We had yet another announcement yesterday from the NSW government of a VFT essentially for country and regional services.
It aint gonna work.
Why not. Well let me go back a long time when I did work for Cityrail as it was known then.
The XPT can only get to half it highest speed when in use at BEST. Why. Because of the track.
So any sort of very fast train would need brand spanking new tracks that go straight. That means buying up a lot of land for a start.
Next let us go to the customer base. Guess who use the XPT services by far the most? Pensioners who essential pay diddly squat for using the service. They visit their children in the bid smoke and then go back home.
It is highly ironic that a luxury bus service would cost less and get there faster than the XPT.
If you are going to create a newer customer base you would need much better track and varied times as the logical new base are people who live outside Sydney but work there.
This would create further pressures on housing prices in the Western suburbs as they would fall and people buy up in areas where they could catch the VFT.
Another problem is you could not have many stations for the said train to stop at otherwise it simply would not be fast.
In essence the NSW government would be subsiding people who live out of Sydney to work in Sydney as this service would never cover its costs.
Now I have only touched the surface but you can see a lot of problems. This explains why we have had so many announcements on such a project in NSW before anyone has looked at its viability.
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