TWENTY YEARS AGO today The Age reported that the government planned no major train or tram extensions during the next 15 to 20 years. The first two paragraphs of that article is below.
The article went on to say that the government's interest was building core capacity through improved signalling and extra track. And that its main metropolitan rail project was a third track to Dandenong (which never got built). Back then time-lines for infrastructure were long - the third track would have a working group report by 2007, a tender initiated in 2008 and completion in 2011.
In 2005 the state government was interested in regional rather than metropolitan rail. Promises for the latter made in 1999 were largely not delivered with spending instead going towards picking up the pieces from the first version of rail franchising which had collapsed.
However patronage was surging and reliability had been in free-fall since late 2003. The Bracks - Brumby government, which initially thought it could outsource blame to private operator Connex, got kicked out in 2010 before benefits from the improvements it finally funded from about 2008 kicked in.
We did end up getting some new rail within 20 years with the South Morang extension opening in 2012 and the Regional Rail Link in 2015. However his prophesy regarding tram extensions proved largely correct, with trams very much the 'stagnant mode' apart from minor extensions in Docklands.
Jump forward to the current time and Betts' successor, DTP Secretary Jeroen Weimar, has downplayed the possibility that we'll see rail electrification to Melton and Wyndham Vale any time soon in a speech given yesterday to the WoMEDA Summit.
1 comment:
Humans might be living on the moon before Melbourne's 30-minute suburban train services are improved. Also too many single-track sections and nothing cheap left except maybe Alamein.
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