The dream of a high-speed train between Sydney and Melbourne reappears


Passage of a passenger train in central western Australia between a highway and agricultural farms. Taras Vyshnya / Alamy via Reuters

DECRYPTION – This old sea serpent is resurfacing pushed by the Labor government. It comes up against the weight of debt and the air transport lobby.

In Sydney

This is a question that every expatriate in Australia asks: how is it that Sydney and Melbourne, two cities separated by 900 km, the equivalent of Paris-Marseille, where more than half of the population is concentrated across the country, are not connected by a high-speed line? The demand, however, would not be lacking, given the crowds, at peak times, at the airports of the two largest cities in the country, during which a flight takes off every fifteen minutes. This makes Sydney-Melbourne the fifth busiest domestic air route in the world. It even came in second place before the Covid. Qantas alone provides 258 connections per week.

An aberration, for a country of barely 26 million inhabitants, which has been agitating the Australian political sphere since the beginning of the 1980s, and which even pushed Shingo Yamagami, the Japanese ambassador, a few weeks ago, to out of his reserve. In an interview given to Sydney Morning…

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