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Comment by jakecopp | Hacker News Reader

With Sydney house prices 12.9 times the median yearly household income [1] second only to Hong Kong (SF is 9.1, Hong Kong is 19.4, San Jose is 10.3 and Vancouver is 12.6) would value capture make a similar high speed project work in Australia? Is the cost in the infrastructure or the rolling stock?

Something like Newcastle <-> Sydney <-> Wollongong?

[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-22/australian-housing-una...

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Even though the rolling stock is technically more advanced and loaded with sensors (sometimes resulting is degraded service aka. lower speed for security reasons) the main cost definitely lies in infrastructure. You basically need to rebuild the whole track for highspeed trains. And with Australia being a litigious nation it will also take a while to acquire and execute the land rights.

The line north of Sydney towards Grosford would have to be completely rebuilt to support fast service.

Sydney to Wollongong seems pretty close (about 70 km) for HSR in the style of the Berlin - Munich train being talked about here.

The way the Spanish are doing it (and they've got a ton of high speed track) is to roll out slower / cheaper rolling stock on the shorter lines (RENFE Avant). The longer distance routes get the faster, fancy tiling trains.

Do you mean transitioning older rolling stock to short lines built to high speed spec and prioritise new trains for the long lines?

Not sure if I understand correctly.

RENFE Avant isn't older rolling stock IIRC. It's just a cheaper version of the RENFE AVE equipment. The idea is that the higher speed trains are more expensive to run and that they take a while to accelerate / decelerate. On a 70 km route the time saved by running a full-on tilting 300 kph train set is probably insignificant and not worth the cost.

SF to San Jose is a similar idea. No sense in having Caltrain run HSR train sets.

There’s some enormous developments happening in gosford at the moment. Talk of building a medical research hub over the station (sort of like how the shopping centre is over Chatswood). Now if only there was a half hour train to the CBD you would be laughing

I wonder if a high speed link to Newcastle via Gosford or a northern beaches link would be more politically doable.

It would change things a lot - really spread the city that direction (and hopefully reverse some of the social problems that occur on the coast from having a lack of young professionals). I think it would also need a light rail connecting gosford - erina - terrigal - the entrance - wyong as well. Then you'd have a real transport system.

unlikely to ever happen!

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