John Paul Wild - Bold Attempt To Revolutionize Australian Transport

Bold Attempt To Revolutionize Australian Transport

Trip on a very slow train

In 1983, Paul Wild conceived the idea of high-speed railway system to link Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

The State Rail Authority of New South Wales was offering a "new rail travel experience" in a powerful and comfortable new express passenger train, the XPT, on services radiating from Sydney. In October that year, he decided to take it from Canberra to a CSIRO meeting in Sydney.

Wild was looking forward to a fast ride on his first country train journey in many years. In the early days of his youth, in the 1930s, railways were always pushing to achieve an average speed of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h). He had grown up "when speed was regarded as the essential thing on the railway". But disappointment in his trip came when he realised that

despite the train's much-publicised but very brief dash at 160 km/h, the journey, over all, had the leisurely features of a branch-line train. ... In the end, the journey took 4 hours and 37 minutes – 20 minutes longer than scheduled, at an average speed of 70.6 kilometres per hour. I was absolutely appalled by the whole thing. After I flew home that night, I looked up an old reference book. I learned that if the train had completed the run in an even four hours – a schedule that was soon to be introduced – it would have travelled at the same average speed of 81.6 km/h as the London to Bristol Express in 1851.

Can CSIRO help?

The next day, Wild wrote to David Hill, the chief executive of the NSW State Rail Authority (SRA): he described his XPT experience and asked, "Can we help in any way to improve things?". Then at a meeting Hill arranged in February 1984, having researched by then the French and Japanese high-speed rail systems (of which he had been only distantly aware when he had taken his journey), Wild and two colleagues discussed the potential for much higher speeds with SRA executives. But despite the cordiality, it became apparent that such a project was unlikely to go far under the umbrella of the SRA. The executives said "country trains" were simply the lowest of their priorities.

Wild experienced "a feeling of deep gloom," but he knew the concept was too good to give up. He began to think of the possibilities of a Sydney–Canberra–Melbourne journey of firstly six hours, then progressively shorter. Eventually he fixed on the notion of completing the journey in three hours, which would be highly competitive with air travel. That meant a speed of 350 kilometres an hour – although the world's fastest train at that time, the French TGV, only travelled at 270 km/h. (Later he was to set his sights on a symbolic speed, just as 60 miles per hour had been the target in his youth: 360 kilometres an hour, because it represented 100 metres per second.)

In April 1984, he and several CSIRO senior staff members, and a senior engineering manager from the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd, met to discuss a concept paper. On the day before Good Friday, they agreed on the components and who would write them. They all had commitments and agreed it would take six weeks to put a draft together. However, such was their private enthusiasm that each of them worked right through the four-day break, virtually finishing their drafts. In July 1984 the completed work was published as A Proposal for a Fast Railway between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. It turned the high-speed train from a broad concept to a tangible proposal, remarkably predicting the main issues that would be involved in the development of an Australian high-speed railway.

From Sydney to Canberra much of the route was similar to that of the Hume Highway. From the national capital it proceeded south – paralleling the coast, generally about 70 kilometres inland – via Cooma and Bombala to Orbost; then west to Melbourne, very close to the coast. This route was chosen because it would provide better access for people in the coastal south-east of New South Wales and eastern Victoria, who were very poorly served by transport links. Further, it would encourage decentralisation more than a wholly inland route would, because about 80 per cent of Australians choose to live within 50 kilometres of the coast. Despite VFT curves being 20 times broader than on the existing Sydney–Melbourne railway, the proposed route went around mountains rather than going through them. The direction of valleys was favourable for the most part, minimising the cost of tunnelling and substantial earthworks.

Wild's science minister, Barry Jones, enclosed a copy in a letter to the Prime Minister, observing that the concept would be very valuable in assisting decentralisation.

First opposition from government

The proposal's reception in the federal transport portfolio was in marked contrast. A meeting with the department secretary and senior officers of his department and the Bureau of Transport Economics was to foreshadow an uneasy relationship that was to continue despite the ostensibly cooperative attitude of federal and state governments. The proposal had been sent to the federal Minister for Transport, Peter Morris, with comments reflecting his officials' opinion: it was not worth considering. Although Sydney–Melbourne was later identified as the fourth-busiest air route in the world (busier than any in North America, or any in Europe apart from Madrid to Barcelona) and the bureau had no firm data on transport markets in south-eastern Australia, its officials judged passenger fares would need to be set at a rate that would not be commercially viable. The bureau would not accept the French experience that the laws of physics (in which momentum is proportional to the square of the velocity) allowed much steeper gradients (hence much fewer cut-and-fill earthworks) than on low-speed railways. The difference in the estimation of earthworks was $2 billion – a significant proportion of the total cost of the project.

In the federal parliament, Morris topped off his officials' scepticism with his own brand of spleen, perhaps tinted by his long union experience in the transport industry. On 12 September 1984, answering a Question without Notice in the House of Representatives, he described the proposal as grandiose, likening it to another proposal to build a canal through the centre of Australia. He said "I will not so recommend to the Government that resources should be allocated to even do a study on it." As a parting shot, he observed that "if, as has been suggested by its proponents ... the private sector is interested in it, I would say to Dr Wild that he should take the proposal back to the private sector ... and let them put it forward and fund it."

After meeting with Morris later in September, Wild decided it was time to speak his mind: he said that "in many areas Australia needed desperately to dig itself out of the stagnation of 19th century thought." He believed the reaction highlighted Australia's general malaise; he deplored the emphasis on the short term and the preference for patching up decaying and unprofitable systems, ignoring imaginative plans for the future. He called for a much larger, objective investigation by independent experts, including those from overseas countries which already had fast trains. In doing so he emphasised that he was not seeking government funding for the scheme – merely support for a $500,000 study that would last 12 months.

He was to say later, "I got myself in some trouble saying that this knock-back was characteristic of the malaise which the country is suffering, which got into a headline. So I sometimes put my foot in it."

Private sector solution

However, there was to be a good outcome: soon afterwards Sir Peter Abeles, head of (then Australian) transport giant TNT, telephoned him and said, "I think I can help you with a commercial solution to your problem." After that, Wild said, "Bit by bit, with his support, I got a joint venture together. And that's when we did the main part of the work."

Wild retired from CSIRO in October 1985, but CSIRO continued to support pre-feasibility studies until October 1988. By September 1986 he had brought together an unincorporated joint venture of TNT Australia Pty Ltd, Elders IXL Limited and Kumagai Gumi Co. Ltd. In August 1987, after delay caused by uncertainties surrounding a potential takeover of their company, the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd joined as the fourth, and subsequently foremost, partner. Wild became chairman of the Very Fast Train Joint Venture.

VFT studies

In June 1987 the joint venture's pre-feasibility study was completed. It postulated that the project was technically feasible and financially viable. It envisaged a purpose-built high-speed line from Sydney to Canberra via Bowral and Goulburn, and either a coastal route from Canberra to Melbourne via Cooma, east Gippsland and the La Trobe Valley – or an inland route though Wagga Wagga, Albury–Wodonga, Wangaratta and Seymour. Later, routes to Brisbane and Adelaide were conceptualised.

In July–August 1988 a $1 million passenger market analysis was completed and a feasibility study was started, for which the joint venture partners budgeted $19 million. In December, a VFT Concept Report was released, identifying the key issues for a high-speed rail system, to be built and operated by private enterprise, with trains operating between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne at speeds up to 350 km per hour. The report sought positive responses from the New South Wales, Victorian and federal governments and the Australian Capital Territory administration in facilitating access to land for survey and route investigation; ensuring cooperation by government agencies; and forms of support, including enactment of legislation to facilitate land acquisition.

The VFT project attracted widespread public and media interest. The latter was not always favourable, picking up on government scepticism about the project. Some public commentators spoke from a pre-ordained position. Although Wild had no doubts about the complexity of such an undertaking in an age of public consultation, he warned that the project would "end in a shambles if every professor and greenie had their say".

Overall public support for the project was very strong. A survey of Gippsland residents found it had 70% support. A Morgan research poll found 65% support for the project throughout Victoria and New South Wales. Another poll showed support throughout metropolitan and country areas of Victoria and New South Wales at 80%.

Setbacks

In July 1990 the VFT joint venture announced comparative studies of market demand and capital costs on the coastal and the inland routes. In October 1990, Wild announced that the inland route was the preferred choice for the VFT. The decision not to proceed with the original route to the east of the Snowy Mountains and through Gippsland was a difficult one for the VFT Joint Venture and for Wild personally. The decision was based purely on the capital costs and predicted financial performance of the two routes: there was no interest from any government in the developmental benefits which the coastal route would have brought to the south-eastern area of Australia.

The decision earned the scorn of the original corporate supporter of the proposal, Sir Peter Abeles, a visionary who from the start had been attracted to the VFT's national development potential. Aware of the growth that fast trains overseas had generated along entire routes, he could not see the point of going inland, where few people wanted to live. His response to the decision was "You've lost the plot".

The project faced other problems. Internally, the views of the members of the joint venture were not always in alignment. As many people in business in Australia know, a joint venture is a less robust form of business enterprise than a company. Certainly there were many strains within the VFT Joint Venture, and they increased as the feasibility study progressed. Wild, referring in 1995 to when the project expanded under the joint venture said, "We then got in some professional management and I think things started to slide from then on.” His role as Chairman of the joint venture was not easy.

Externally, there was the continuing issue of dealing with four governments, i.e. the federal government; the state governments of New South Wales and Victoria; and following the recent granting of self-government to the national capital, the Australian Capital Territory government. They had differing agendas and a tendency to look for problems associated with the project rather than the opportunities it offered. This attitude led to the eventual insurmountable hurdle which the project faced, when the issue arose of the tax treatment which would be necessary for the project to proceed. The VFT team worked hard in 1990 and 1991 to devise an acceptable approach. Despite the economic benefits which had been identified in a third-party analysis the federal government was not prepared to move in the area of tax.

Wild retained a sense of bitterness about the federal government's short-sightedness that thwarted the project. He said:

The thing that lost the project in the end was that we were asking for some very reasonable taxation arrangements which would apply in the early days of very heavy spending – in the long run we would be paying more taxes but we just wanted to ease the taxes during that early time – and that was knocked back by the government, in fact by the treasurer ... Paul Keating, and I would say that he is the man responsible for stopping project."

In August 1991 the federal government gave its final, negative answer and the joint venture ceased work on the project. Ironically, the federal government soon introduced infrastructure bonds to assist major projects facing the same financial hurdles as the VFT. However, Australian governments have continued to struggle to find acceptable mechanisms for public–private partnerships undertaking infrastructure projects.

Wild also concluded there were internal factors that in hindsight could be seen to have hampered the project: he believed the chosen corporate structure of a joint venture lacked the governance strengths and focus of a company; too many project delays had occurred; and it would have been better to buy TGVs "off the shelf" than to proceed, as they had, with a train that was to be designed and built in Australia.

Other countries forge ahead

But others benefited from Wild's visionary ideas: he conceptualised a Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway, which is now in commercial service.

When the VFT was conceived, only three countries were running rail services at more than 200 km/h on purpose-built tracks: France, Japan and Italy. If the VFT project had advanced reasonably quickly, Australia would have been about the sixth country in the world to have high-speed rail, after Germany and Spain. Today, high speed rail services are operating in a dozen countries, and a similar number are building or planning them. Australia has dropped far behind.

The man who at the age of seven wanted to be an engine driver did not see his childhood dream realised in his adopted country. Almost 30 years later, the Canberra–Sydney train still travels, if it runs on time, no faster than the London to Bristol Express did in 1851.