The federal body’s publicly available evaluation of the business case says trains will average 50km/h for all-station services and 73km/h for express.
Not exactly high-speed rail, is it?
“The Faster Rail name was a bit of a way of fooling people,” says Robert Dow, from advocacy group Rail Back on Track.
“And in the case of the Logan-Gold Coast Faster Rail, it certainly fooled a lot. They’re not getting anything like 160km/h.
Even the place names “Logan-Gold Coast” in the title are a tad misleading: the upgrades stop short of downtown Gold Coast by almost 50 kilometres. Finding a way around this, the government sometimes adds in brackets “Kuraby to Beenleigh”.
Doesn’t surprise me. I highly doubt we’ll ever have proper fast rail with trains regular going fast enough to count as fast rail in my lifetime
Who knows? Maybe a wealthy man might come to your town and start singing a monorail song.
