I know I'm channeling my inner train geek here, but this morning's Guardian had an article by a transport expert on how, by adopting tilting trains, as has been done in Queensland, and some comparatively modest improvement to the track, it would be possible to roughly halve the Sydney Melbourne travel time.
And of course the thing about track improvements and realignments is that they do not all need to be done at once, leading to incremental improvements in travel times.
As I commented a few days ago, NSW has a project to replace the elderly XPT and Xplorer trains with new Spanish sourced trains.
These trains alone won't deliver any substantial improvement in performance and travel times - I guess the prime aim of the train replacement project is to contain ongoing maintenance and running costs by standardising on a single train type, which we assume is predicted to be less than the current trains.
As the NSW government themselves admit, it's not expected to deliver improved service times. There is of course a risk that having bought shiny new trains NSW would be reluctant to buy additional tilting trains, even if they were to undertake a programme of track improvements ...
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