by Gareth Hughes
Rail has a bright future both here and overseas. Here’s why:
Recent press from overseas saw Australian trucking magnate, Lindsay Fox, publicly support a campaign to move more freight by rail. In a rare show of non-partisan honesty, Fox said, “’I'm talking against myself when I’m talking about putting things on rail. We’re only here for a short time…I’d certainly like to see some of these things [done] that are in the interests of the nation.”
In the same week, the world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, announced an investment of $US34 billion in rail. Buffet said, “Our country’s future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system.”
Our own Minister of Transport has remained sceptical about rail’s likely future. Joyce has retreated from a key target in the New Zealand Transport Strategy to grow rail’s share of the freight task from 18 to 25% by 2040. He’s funded the bare minimum of essential investment to keep the network operational. And he’s placed an unfair expectation on rail that “all investments in the national rail network [will] provide a commercial rate of return.” (Investments in roads have no such similar requirement.)
But the last two investments the Government has made in rail have been stunning successes.
Last year, the Government subsidised the building of a rail siding at Tangiwai to enable forest products to travel by rail rather than road to the Port of Wellington. An investment of just over $1 million spread over three years is yielding cost savings to Government of $16 million and benefits to the nation of $9 million. 3,000 trucks/year are being taken off our roads as a result of this subsidy.
Another investment of just under $1 million to build log transfer yards in Marton, Wanganui, and Masterton will realise a $90 million return to the nation over the 30-year life of the project. By year four of operations, 9,000 trucks/year will no longer be barrelling down our roads.
These two small investments yield benefit cost ratios of 99 — an arbitrary number due to the fact they have negative costs. The 99 means they’re investment no-brainers, the likes of which even the Road Transport Forum couldn’t stop. (They tried.)
Rail in New Zealand has been mismanaged in the past and, under private ownership, run down to the point of collapse. Joyce is right to approach any new investment with scepticism. But he also needs to understand the tremendous potential for economic benefit from the right investment in the right places. Without a modern rail network, we’ll never be able to tap these investment no-brainers that are everywhere there are trucks moving freight in large numbers. Perhaps this is why Mainfreight, New Zealand’s largest trucking firm, is backing the future of rail in this country too.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare | Environment & Resource Management | Featured | THE ISSUES by Gareth Hughes on Tue, March 2nd, 2010
Tags: BCR, lindsay fox, rail, road transport forum, steven joyce, tangiwai rail siding, Wairarapa log transfer, warren buffet
More posts by Gareth Hughes | more about Gareth Hughes
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
- if industry providors in the transport field are investing in rail infrastructure, surely Joyce can see that there’s a higher priority being acknowledged by these long-term players in the industry?
TVNZ has quietly shown documentaries about our great rail networks, one of which had Marcus Lush walking and cyling along defunct rail tracks – which are all still there on the landscape, just waiting for the rails to be re-applied to the land.
The cognitive dissonance that says ‘private transport is the reward of private effort’, never mind the condition of the planet, is going to have to be seen for the madness that it is.
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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10629459
Not quite as exciting as it sounds but there you go.
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However Mainfreight is a multinational, so it seems that crusty dogma is their primary policy driver. Contrary evidence or analysis is to be avoided – especially Treasury’s Regulatory Impact statements: http://blog.greens.org.nz/2010/02/26/nats-undermining-open-government/
So anywhere that the forces of crusty dogma align with the interests of multinationals, or that they can achieve enough political support to attack will be sucked dry.
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Get Across are currently asking for feedback on the Harbour Bridge on their survey:
http://survey.usuite.com/survey/7c130cf3178940d2a8421693b340d7f5.sur
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- The Marsden Port line
- Upgrading the North Auckland Line
- Allowing containers to be carried on the entire network
- Increasing the gauge weight to 22 tons (European Standard)
- Double tracking and electrifying; Auckland –> Hamilton, Hamilton –> Tauranga, Hamiltion –> Rotorua and easing alignments to allow us to run 180 km/hr tilt trains
- New rolling stock
All up probably about $4,000,000,000 and would revolutionise transport in NZ…
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It is good in many ways thatt the govt does invest in industrial use rail service , the primary of course being as you said Mr Hughes MP, that a good couple of thousand logging trucks will no longer be clogging our road ways meaning less traffic on our major highways due to one logger travelling at 65 km/h . Hopefully in doing that there will be a very great economic boost due to the freeing up of roadways for normal truck loads and general traffic
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How wonderful – we save $90m over 30 years ($3m per year).
9000 drivers lose their jobs, at a loss to the economy of $450m per year ($13,500 million loss over the 30 year period) – on top of money going into benefits over that period.
So the loss is 150 times greater than the saving.
The situation is not so simplistic as “rail good, road bad”.
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“Dumb money supporting roads” might have been a better title.
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truck drivers can drive more than one kind of truck.
Like refrigerated container trucks, slider-sided trucks, cattle trucks, furniture-moving trucks, milk tankers … you get the picture?
No truck drivers losing jobs, just using their skills to shift a different load… not rocket science, is it?
And yes, Toad has a good point, too – some of them would shift tasks to loading the rail carriages with timber, or some other job in the forestry service towns, because they want to stay near where they’ve been living.
Mostly, it just cuts the cost of goods distribution for all the other goods that move on the roads, because less congestion means the trucks can travel in regular hours (some truckies were working permanent night shifts, ‘cos it was the only way to get goods Wellington to Auckland or reverse, with the state highway traffic so loaded.)
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so katie – where are you going to make 9000 new driving jobs? – or are you going to take them off people who already have them?
And the timber loading jobs – where are you going to make new timber loading jobs, or are you going to replace the pople who already do that work?
And trucks driving only during the day, means you need twice as many trucks to do the same number of trips – that’s completely uneconomic, so that’s a non-starter.
Dumb money supporting roads should perhaps be dumb money supporting rail. Though to be honest, the likes of timber and coal are two loads that may suit rail – but there’s not many others, especially in a place like NZ.
We are one of the most inefficient places in the world to run a rail system. We have
- low population
- low population density
- no large cities for point to point transport
- a spread out country
- a gap in the middle (Cook Strait)
- mountainous topography
- no land borders with neighbours
There is a point with rail where it is LESS efficient than road transport, and in NZ that point comes much sooner that almost every other country.
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As it stands it does best when moving bulk freight over long distance so the easiest wins I would expect to be found by removing barriers to moving more bulk freight by rail – freight that isn’t quite viable now due to logistic issues and handling overheads. Solve those and you could be looking at a multi-modal solution for a number of loads that currently travel long distances by truck, with the associated reductions in emissions and highway congestion.
There’s no sentimentality in the transport industry – come up with a workable solution that lets them do something for less and they will. If you want to make yourself useful right now go figure out how to let a logging truck offload at a rail hub as near as practical to their operation inside of 10 minutes, securely and without assistance, and leave for another load with that load delivered to the wharf to a predictable timeframe and at less cost than driving all the way there and back. Once you’ve nailed the technology and process you could tailor it for all manner of loads from trucks full of courier parcels to trucks full or petrol; trucking companies effectively subcontracting rail for the part of the journey it does more cheaply and concentrating on the end points.
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Trevor.
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So the original claim that 9000 trucks per year will be removed is misleading? By leaving out the word journeys, they make us think that 9000 trucks are being taken off the roads, when the real figure may only be 36, or less than 10 if they do three or four short journeys per day.
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“I’d certainly like to see some of these things [done] that are in the interests of the nation.”
You seem very reluctant to agree with him.
Would you rather see things done (or retained) that don’t ‘help the nation’?
Seems that way.
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greenfly – there you go again. Take something that I haven’t even commented on at all (Lindsay Fox’s statement) then criticise my position on it.
Instead of making up false positions in your mind for people, then criticising those people for the positions they’ve never taken, perhaps you should stick to the real world and what people have actually said.
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Why deliver logs to the wharf.
I can’t understand our nations penchant for selling our best raw materials overseas in raw form. It’s just crazy!!! We should only be exporting higher value processed materials and end products.
We are loosing out on huge opportunities to increase employment, decrease carbon emissions (via only exporting the processed/finished higher value goods & materials), and we get to improve our GDP without exporting more stuff, by exporting more valuable stuff.
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I wonder what the Dumb Money is doing?
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photonz1 – Do you agree with his statement?
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greenfly – I don’t even know myself whether I agree with his statement or not, as I haven’t had time to read it let alone think about it, let alone compare what that means to a country with
1/ flat topography
2/ five times our population
3/ divided into a small number of high population cities
4/ that has large amounts of single point (mines) to single point (ports) exports.
5/ greater distances
6/ much much higher volume of heavy freight.
What does he say about New Zealand’s completely different situation?
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“So the original claim that 9000 trucks per year will be removed is misleading?”
No not misleading unless you think individual truck drivers are only aloud to make 1 trip a year…
The simple fact of the matter is rail is much more competitive than road when you take into account the massive hidden subsidy that you and I give the trucking companies due to rates and taxes…
A 44 ton truck does 10,000 times the damage to a section of road than a 1 ton car… Do the trucking companies pay the majority of the road taxes..? No… Do they pay their share..? Not even close…
Quite simply if trucking companies had to pay the way for their own infrastructure as rail does (minus $90m per year) road frieght would be far more expensive than rail… Given the upcoming massive problems of carbon pricing and peak “cheap” oil investing in rail freight and public transport is a no brainer to everyone except Steven Joyce…
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Change the Left Hand Rule – Run Distraction!!!
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Jeremy – of course it’s misleading.
If you are going to talk about truck journeys, instead of trucks, then you need to include the word “journey”.
Leaving it out completely changes the meaning.
Your analysis that rail is more efficient is also wrong. It is only more efficient in certain circumstances. In NZ that means a large volume of bulk load from one point (which just happens to be on a rail network) to another point that also happens to be on a rail network.
The view that “rail is more efficient” is simplistic and demonstrably false in many cases. If you want a load to go from a busy port like Napier, or Gisborne, by rail to Rotorua, Hamilton or Auckland, FIRST it has to go all the way to Wellington. Then it has to be swapped to another train, before it can finally start heading to it’s destination, half an island further way from where it started.
Add a truck trip at each end, and additional transfer costs (i.e fork lifts, extra wages), the longer time needed for delivery, and the fact that the load sits still going nowhere until every other last wagon is loaded, and you have a system that is very INefficient.
Add to that track maintenance costs, which are very high for the amount of freight that can ever be carried.
So we should encourage bulk loads like coal and logs onto rail where rail can carry it efficiently, and where the end points are on rail routes (there is no rail through many major forestry regions like Nelson, Taupo, East Cape etc).
But we also need to be careful not to take a simplistic and wrong view that rail is always more efficient.
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Sorry Photonz, I should have clarified that by “efficient” I was referring to fuel use per km, on that I am very correct rail using 1/4 to 1/6 the fuel, even better if electrified…
As oil costs increase significantly over the next 10 years, we will be needing a lot more rails and a lot less roads, these things take time to plan, consent and build and we need to start now… The last thing we need is more motorways…
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photonz1, why does that stuff have to go all the way to Wellington?
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13,000 less truck movements a year may mean some truck drivers lose their jobs…but who really wants to live in an economy where so many people are needed to simply shift stuff about? Trucks are an inefficient use of labour. More trains moving logs is smart economics.
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StephenR – sorry – I should have said it would have to go via Palmerston North, but I think you get my point.
A short local road trip from say Gisborne to Whakatane, on rail would mean having to go in the opposite direction all the way to Palmerston North, then all the way up to Hamilton, before coming back to Whakatane -1000km rail trip instead of a 200km road trip.
Similarly Westport to Nelson – a 200km road trip – would likely go via Christchurch on rail, up to Blenheim, and would have to finish with a road trip of over 100km anyway – a total of 3 or 4 times the original distance.
Jeremy – fuel consumption is just one factor in efficiency. Because our rail network is less than 5% of our road network, rail journeys are often much longer than road journeys. And then there will almost always have to be road journeys at each end anyway, (sometimes in the wrong direction to get to the rail point), and there is the inefficiency of having the cost of two extra transfers, which often are only done in major freight yards – (which rules out most pick ups and drop offs from towns outside the main centres).
Then you can the massive cost of engines and rolling stock, and the cost of track maintenance. Then there’s the cost to businesses of very slow delivery. And the fact that because of a much larger and more versatile road network, trucks are more likely to get a back load while the train returns empty.
Also trucks are likely to become much more efficient in the future, especially when we start getting deisel electric hybrids (just like system train engines have used for decades).
Many of rails inefficiencies lead to much more fuel being used, meaning an assessment of the efficeincy of rail based on basic fuel use comparison is misleading.
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Well about 40,000 km of the 100,000 km road network you mention is unpaved so you are hardly going to see trucks on them but I would have thought the huge imbalance in the road and rail network lengths just points out the massive underinvestment in our rail network, particularly over the last 25 years…
Before it’s (temporary) closure the SOL line was having a de-railment in 1 in 10 trains going down it… That is a disgrace in African countries and shows the lack of investment…
Well you mention rail’s “massive costs” there, while completely missing the earlier point that joe average is heavily subsidising the trucking industry… If the trucking industry had to pay for their own infrastructure costs for them would skyrocket, while rail is competitive in bulk freight and do pay for their own infrastructure (minus $90m)…
My point is, when you run an asset into the ground you can’t then claim “see how inefficient it is”…
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Rail is efficient in the United States, Australia, Russia and China because distances are huge and loads are from concentrated sources and delivered to concentrated destinations.
I have seen US trains which are literally miles long carrying a single load (grain) in container carriages which are all dedicated to grain. This is why a higher percentage of freight is carried on rail in the US than in Europe where these conditions apply.
Similarly Australia runs efficient rail freight. New Zealand is hopelessly disadvantaged when it comes to rail and as trucks become more and more efficient and can be electronically convoyed the gap will only increase.
I would have thought the difference between the Australian transport economy would be obvious to anyone.
Scenic rail has a future for the same reason as I took the Orient Express from Venice to London. Once.
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Gareth’s point was that rail is efficient in NZ. He gave two clear examples.
If airline and airport security continue their insane trajectory (fairly good at avoiding it in NZ so far) then inter city trains will be faster than planes and way more convenient.
peace
W
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Yes, rail can work in NZ when it connects and inland port to an ocean port.
But these are exceptions to the general rule.
An inland port has concentrated sources and an ocean port is a concentrated destination.
The vast majority of trips have dispersed sources and dispersed destinations.
The beauty of the convoyed truck on a dedicated truck lane is that the local driver drives to the convoy point and then drives an arriving truck back to somewhere close to where he came from. The truck is then convoyed so that one driver and the computer drive maybe ten or twenty trucks to their destination decoupling point.
That driver then drives a convoy back home (after a rest). The local drivers take the de-convoyed trucks to their dispersed destinations. The best way to provide these truck/bas lanes is to lay them over existing unused rail lines. The cost benefit is huge and gets massive trucks off the highways and we don’t kill so many tourists.
And the trucks are running on flat rail beds rather than grinding up hills.
An English study found this system should replace most of the intercity trains in the UK.
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Jeremy – it’s completely uneconomic to build new lines when –
- we have a very small population.
- we have low population density
- we have steep topography
- rail needs incredilbly expensive viaducts and tunnels that roads don’t
- even if massive levels of freight switched to rail, we still wouldn’t have the volume to make it pay
If you base fair road costs on maintenance costs only, then trucks don’t pay their fair share. But if you use this theory, then ONLY trucks would pay, and cars would get a virtually free ride (or at least 10,000 cars would pay a total the same as one truck).
So should cars get to use all the roads and pay nothing, and trucks pay everything?
That’s one of the efficiencies of the roading system – it’s used for private use, public passenger services, long haul freight, short haul freight, emergency vehicles, tourism, campervans, mototrbikes, cyclists etc.
With rail, you have a transport corridor that is often far more expensive than a road to build, and you have just one transport sector to cover the cost.
As for your claim that trucks hardly used the unpaved network – there you’ll find plenty of milk tankers, as well as trucks carrying cattle, sheep, wool, hay, fertiliser, bulk grain, fruit grapes, vegetables, timber, gravel and aggregates, farm equipment etc.
In fact if you take our BIGGEST export industries – dairy, timber, crops, lamb, beef, fruit, wine, wool – you’ll find pretty much all of the exports start their journey on a gravel road.
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photonz1 all your specific examples of rail having to take the long way around are stupid examples, and are exactly why we need to spend more on the rail network instead of less.
“If you want a load to go from a busy port like Napier, or Gisborne, by rail to Rotorua, Hamilton or Auckland, FIRST it has to go all the way to Wellington. Then it has to be swapped to another train, before it can finally start heading to it’s destination, half an island further way from where it started.”
“A short local road trip from say Gisborne to Whakatane, on rail would mean having to go in the opposite direction all the way to Palmerston North, then all the way up to Hamilton, before coming back to Whakatane -1000km rail trip instead of a 200km road trip.”
If we actually cared about our rail network and various chunks of it had closed this wouldn’t be a problem. There was a line north of gisborne running next to SH2. it was built as far as matawai. There was also a rail line to taneatua, which was closed some years back. these sections of rail never joined up.
there have also been proposals to build a rail line from te puke to rotorua, which has never happened. the rotorua branch is closed.
So if all those various rail lines had not been closed, and the proposed rail lines had been built and completed then freight could easily be railed directly from napier or gisborne to all destinations you mentioned. It is a shame our rail network has shrunk over the years and not expanded.
“Similarly Westport to Nelson – a 200km road trip – would likely go via Christchurch on rail, up to Blenheim, and would have to finish with a road trip of over 100km anyway – a total of 3 or 4 times the original distance.”
nelson had a railway at one point, but sadly it was never linked to the rest of the rail network. funnily enough if it did link up with the rail network it would be towards westport. Once again if we cared about rail and expanded instead of closed this wouldn’t be a problem.
tl;dr
your argument is boils down to rail sucks because it doesn’t go to these places. argument is bs because either it did and some idiot decided to close those lines or never build them.
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Bliss says “then inter city trains will be faster than planes and way more convenient”
It will never happen in NZ. Very few passenger systems anyhere in the world are profitable.
In NZ, high speed passenger trains would need a near continuous run of viaducts and tunnels.
With low population to pay for and use such a system, it would be a massively inefficient use of money.
It would be cheaper to buy everyone their own plane.
Owen hit the nail on the head. There would be few countries on the whole planet where rail has so many disadvantages as New Zealand.
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Naive duffers!
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greenfly – so fonterra use trains to get the milk from 20,000 far flung rural properties ?
Or do they use it to take bulk freight from a single point to a single point
5078934tdfgj – if rail can’t make money with existing main lines, (even when it underspends on maintenance) then it would certainly be throwing billions of taxpayers dollars down the drain, if it decided to build new lines to minor destinations (which it would have to pay for – THEN lose more money running the system).
There seems to be a blind faith among some greens that because a train uses less fuel per tonne of freight, then it MUST be far more efficient.
If they looked at the whole picture, they’d realise that this is only true in a limited number of circumstnaces – i.e. bulk single point to bulk single point.
In virtually all other circumstances, rail is not very efficient.
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If rail is electrified, it is a lot easier to run trains from renewable resources such as hydro, wind, wave, solar and geothermal power than it is to run trucks from renewable resources. As peak oil starts to bite and we see oil climbing up to and past $US200/barrel, rail will start looking much more attractive. And if we start to see oil wars and other disruptions to our oil supplies, we might be very grateful that at least trains can still be kept running.
Heck – even if the rail lines aren’t electrified, we can run wood-fired trains again. I haven’t heard of anyone running a wood-powered truck
Trevor.
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http://www.ag.auburn.edu/agrn/bio-truck/info.html
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Not quite the sort of truck I was thinking of…
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Trevor29 – electrification is a good idea, but again, it is massively expensive. It’s not just a matter of running a few power lines.
Virtually every tunnel will have to be enlarged, few under passes and over bridges will have the neccessary clearance, and generally if you want it to be efficient you need large volumes of freight, and a totally modified track alignment to take out all tight curves.
In many places this means complete realignments over many kilometres.
On top of this, to take increased freight volumes and loads, and overhead lines, you will need a new set of bridges – the cost of that is immense. Then there’s the cost of new engines.
If you are going to spend a few billion dollars, you have to work out how many decades it will take so that the savings add up to the investment. Would it ever make financial sense for such a small country? Then that return needs to be compared to the same money spent on other areas – home insulation, solar water heating, double glazing, and in other road transport areas – road alignment, congestions reduction, surface improvements, fuel efficiency improvements etc.
Money is not unlimited – it needs to be spent where the best efficiency gains (carbon and financial) are made.
Rail has a large advantage where there are bulk point to point loads, in high volume, over flat terrain, in a high population, high populatiion country, particularly with land borders to other similar countries.
On a world scale, we have none of the things that make rail efficient. What we think of bulk is pretty small scale. The best example is probably coal.
Maybe we can help rail by opening up more coal mines?
So you can easily throw away billions of dollars on electrification, for what is a small efficiency gain.
A great example of this is the main truck line in the North Island. Vast sums of money were spent in the 80s on this project, yet despite a massive input, rail STILL struggled to be competitive or get any sort of return back for all the money spent.
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So photonz the fact private cars use the road also means we should pay for damage not caused by us..? Explain that to me slowly using small words please, why should truck companies not pay for the damage they cause when it is diverting freight from a much more environmentally friendly and less fuel consuming alternative..?
Trucks do hardly use the unpaved network… What percentage of the total distance travelled by trucks in New Zealand is over unpaved roads..?
My guess 2%…
Your right money needs to be spent carefully… HSR is NOT an option in NZ however 160 km/hr – 180 km/hr rail between Auckland –> Hamilton –> Rotorua/Tauranga where 65% of our population will be living in a couple of decades, I would electrify these lines and complete electrification of the NIMT over a period of years…
There is literally billions of dollars that could be well spent on the rail network however National is only interested in approving multi billion dollar roading projects with NEGATIVE BCRs and that is after the British and now the Americans who our BCR system is based on have changed their BCR systems (UK in 2000) or are about to (signalled by the US DOT)…
It is just poor policy and when carbon pricing and the end of cheap oil is taken into account downright crazy… Given the facts Joyce has shown in answers to questions he does not believe in peak oil, doesn’t understand the concept of induced demand and thinks cars will pay for their carbon emmission and STILL be more efficient than rail or PT we are in big trouble till he is gone…
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Jeremy – you can make an arguement that trucks should pay ALL road maintenance, and cars none. But then cars are would be freeloading.
Surely by making cars pay for their road use as well, that helps cut down on car usage. If you don’t do that, then public transport would be much less viable.
Electrification is not the be all and end all. Many places are actually REPLACING electrification and going back to deisel-electric as it is more efficient for some lines (i.e. NSW and Victoria have reverted back to deisel-electric – Qld has gone the other way).
Places where electric is at a disadvantage over deisel include lines that are slow and where freight volumes are not so high. i.e. New Zealand.
You say there are billions of dollars that could be well spent on rail. This is unlikely, as if it was to be WELL spent, we would need a return on the investment.
Those billions invested would need to be paid back to taxpayers in improved effciencies.
And considering the whole railway is only worth a total of 0.25 billion, then it may take a few centuries to get billions back.
Hence, if you want to save money and carbon, there are other areas where you will get a far better return on taxpayers money.
And while you can have a FUEL EFFICIENT passenger system, they are often ECONOMICALLY INEFFICIENT. It looks nice and green on the surface, but if you add all the carbon produced by workers making money to pay millions in tax that goes to subsidies, then the situation changes.
The TOTAL carbon usage to have passenger rail doesn’t stop with the trains – you need to add all the carbon emmitted from working to provide millions in subsidies needed to run the system.
When I was working for the railways there was only ONE passenger system in the world that didn’t lose money. That’s probably changed now, but the point is that the cost of passenger rail is usually far greater that what you can charge for tickets.
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You’ve just said so many incorrect things I don’t know where to begin, here I guess:
I’m not making an argument for trucks to pay for all the maintanance, just the damage thay cause, you didn’t answer the question:
“why should truck companies not pay for the damage they cause when it is diverting freight from a much more environmentally friendly and less fuel consuming alternative..?”
I assume you can’t…
Cars paying higher road user charges does reduce their usage but when a country follows a rampant roads only policy for 50 years people don’t really have many other options do they..?
Where did I say electrification was the be all and end all, actually the NIMT currently would be more efficient if it underwent dieselisation due to the cost of having two facilities to deal with both diesel and electric locomotives however if you take into account projected oil prices and environmental issues it makes very good sense, our current BCR process doesn’t take into account these issues and the UK and US BCR processes ours are based on have changed, they now do…
New Zealand is supremely suited to electrification as it provides greater housepower and traction, two things you really want in a mountainous country with winding track, I don’t know where you got that from…
Of course money needs to be well spent and provide a return on investment, you seem to have it in your head that any money spent on rail would not garner a return no matter what… I posted a lot of potential spending earlier in the thread that would provide a good return on a fraction of the money the government is about to waste on the Roads of National Significance:
- Upgrading the North Auckland Line
- Allowing containers to be carried on the entire network
- Increasing the gauge weight to 22 tons (European Standard)
- New rolling stock, add to that:
- Track easement
- New passing loops
You could complete all this for about the same amount of money National is spending on Transmission gully or Puhoi to Wellsford which have BCRs of 0.65 and 0.8 and this is using NZ’s overinflatatory (I think I just invented that word) BCR system…
What crap, Bill English’s Treasury has valued the railway network at $11 billion dollars… Don’t confuse it’s worth as an SOE and as an asset…
Where are we going to get a better reduction in carbon emissions..?
Power..? Where 75% is already renewable…
Farming..? Which no one will touch with a 10 foot pole and we don’t have a solution to methane emissions…
Or what about transport where emission grew more and faster than any other sector of the NZ economy over the last 20 years…?
Your last three paragraphs are crap, there are plenty of passenger railways that make a profit from memory even most lines on the US’s bollocks Amtrack system make a profit…
Countries pay subsidies to rail usually via the government while citizens in NZ (and most other countries) pay subsidies to car use…
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Jeremy
1/ you say “Cars paying higher road user charges does reduce their usage..”
Rubbish. If taxes for road use were removed then petrol would cost 90c litre. Cars would be used a lot more, just like they did when petrol dropped a year ago.
Trucks and cars share the road, and should share the costs. There have always been claims that trucks should pay all the costs, because they cause all the damage, but it’s a weak arguement when there are also buses, campervans cars etc also using the road system.
As for subsidies – the govt has just said it would have to put a BILLION dollars of taxpayer money into rail, that it expects to get no return on – none at all (from the equivalent of a $500 subsidy from every worker in the country). Not even a little bit of tax on a small profit (which it gets off truck companies, on top of road user charges).
2/ You claim NZ is supremely suited to electrification. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We are almost the worst country in the world for it. At a billion dollars per ten km of line (the cost of the new LA to SAN Francisco line) you need large volumes of passengers and freight to make it worthwile.
In fact through most of the states it’s considered (even with volumes far greater than NZ, and much flatter terrain) that electric is uneconomical.
3/ You seem to think rail can make money in NZ, with low volumes, low passengers, slow lines, steep torpography, no neighbouring countries, and spread out destinations, with small populations.
Countries that have the opposite of all these factors STILL have trouble making money with rail. From the NY Times
“High-speed rail is good for society and it’s good for the environment, but it’s not a profitable business,” said Mr. Barrón of the International Union of Railways. He reckons that only two routes in the world — between Tokyo and Osaka, and between Paris and Lyon, France — have broken even.”
4/ Carbon reduction. If we electrify the rail system (where each loco will use the equivalent electricity of 10,000 houses) then we are less likely than ever to dump our coal fired generation plants. And electric trains using coal fired power produce more carbon than a deisel-electric.
5/ The railways was sold for $400m, the track bought back for a dollar, and the rest for $665m, which analysts said was twice it’s value. It needs another billion spent on it just to keep it going but is not expected to earn even a dollar of this back.
And now you say it’s worth $11 BILLION? Who would pay $11 billion for a company that loses money, always has, and always will?
There is only one way it’s worth $11b – and that’s if you rip up the tracks and sell the land WITHOUT rails on it.
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You’re obviously not quick on the uptake so I think I’ll make this my last post unless you say something outrageous in reply…
On point 1, the statement, “Cars paying higher road user charges does reduce their usage..” was YOUR contention and I agreed, then in the next post you call it rubbish, do you really think that higher costs doesn’t reduce car usage..? Are you just interested in opposing whatever I say now..?
I’ve never contended that cars and trucks shouldn’t share the costs just that they should pay for the damage that they cause as a group of vehicles, it is not right that we subsidise rich trucking company owners and turn trucking into a more profitable business than more environmentally friendly forms of transport… You haven’t provided an answer to this fundamental question, why should trucks not pay their way..?
When you add in the huge hidden parking costs we all also pay for car use (even if we don’t drive), the $560 million dollar cost to the ecoonomy every year from road deaths and it makes many of your arguments very weak…
On point 2, why are you comparing a BRAND NEW High Speed Rail line in the US with electrifying existing track in NZ..? The electrification contract in Auckland is $500 m for 67 km of line, just under $7.5 m a km…
The main reason so little of the US is electrified is that almost the WHOLE network can handle double stacked containers (who you can’t put an electrification system over that easily or cheaply) and little is passenger only line, add to that the very low cost of diesel in the US and as a result, little electrification…
Point 3, of course rail can make money in NZ if; supported by a world class PT system in our cities (ours is currently some of the poorest run in the world), removal of hidden subsidies for the trucking companies and parking and investment in the rail network to bring the existing track at least to first world standard… I don’t know why you keep adding quotes about High Speed Rail, I’ve said earlier that is not practical in NZ…
Full exploitation of our renewable energy sources and true energy efficiency means that we could quite easily remain at current fossil and renewable split, you overestimate exactly how much power an electric loco uses and remember that when not accelerating it actually regenerates electricity back into the grid…
I didn’t say the network is worth $11 billion, Treasury did and I already said don’t mistake it’s value as an SOE with it’s value as an asset… Go and look it up on the Treasury website if you don’t believe me… By the by the road network was valued at over a $100 billion, do you think it would sell for that much too..?
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If we electrify the rail system (where each loco will use the equivalent electricity of 10,000 houses)…
Not with the type of locos we are likely to use here! A 1320 h.p. loco is about 1 MegaWatt, while operating at its continuous power rating. A house is normally taken to be about 1 kiloWatt when averaged over the whole day and night. Therefore photonz1′s estimate is out by a factor of 10 or more (locos don’t operate 24/7).
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Gov03_10Rail-t1-body-d38.html
Trevor.
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Trevor – we are currently have deisel electric (with new more powerful locos arriving soon) that are nearly three times that power output. The mot commonly used electric locos in NZ are 4000hp.
However your figure of 1300hp applies to the old EO class electric locos which were introduced 42 years ago in 1968, and used on the Otira line – but the electriifcation of that line was discontinued in 1997.
The were decommisioned and some are in Ferrymead Museum, but two or three were later refurbished and are now used for light commuter work in Wellington.
However you’re right – I should have said each “train” uses the equivalent of 10,000 houses. The advantage of electrification is larger loads and longer trains – for example in Qld they put up to five electric locos together which use the same power as 20,000 houses.
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Trevor – did you actually read your reference link?
It came from an 80 year old magazine article published in 1929
The electric locos we use today, have increased power a little bit since the 1920s models.
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Ah – the perils of a Google search. However I did provide a reference so my mistake can be easily detected.
You have not provided the base for your calculations of 10,000 or 20,000 homes. For example, are you assuming 1hp = 1kW or are you using the more accurate value of 1hp = 750 Watts? Are you assuming that a 4000hp loco draws that 3000kW 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – the assumption behind the averaged power use of a home – and are you taking a home as drawing 1kW?
Realistically the full output power of a loco is only used when accelerating – only a few minutes at a time. Unless the train is climbing a slope, the power used when operating at a constant speed is much lower than the loco’s full power.
Trevor.
PS: Google gives a value of 1hp = 745.7 Watts (rounded).
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“Electrification is not the be all and end all. Many places are actually REPLACING electrification and going back to deisel-electric as it is more efficient for some lines (i.e. NSW and Victoria have reverted back to deisel-electric – Qld has gone the other way).”
I would point out that the reason why New South Wales and Victoria shifted from electric to diesel-electric haulage is because of the fundamental problems of a 1500V DC system – modern freight trains are not easily hauled by 1500V DC locomotives, and that was part of the reason why Otira was de-electrified back in 1997. Queensland, on the other hand, uses the 25kV AC system which is more efficient and can handle more freight.
I would also remind readers that there were valid reasons (especially in New South Wales) as to why those lines were electrified in the first place – the Blue Mountains Line, for instance, has grades as steep as 1 in 33. In the days of steam, this obviously caused a problem – for instance, a 38 class locomotive required a tender load of coal to get from Sydney to Mount Victoria (about 100km) and needed two firemen working at maximum effort to keep the locomotive going.
“In fact through most of the states it’s considered (even with volumes far greater than NZ, and much flatter terrain) that electric is uneconomical.”
In the US, there is also the problem of double-stacking – electrification and double-stacking do not mix. That is why the ARTC in Australia prohibits electrification of lines that they are leasing is because they eventually want a system involving some element of double-stacking.
“You seem to think rail can make money in NZ, with low volumes, low passengers, slow lines, steep torpography, no neighbouring countries, and spread out destinations, with small populations.”
Rail can make money in New Zealand, so long as there is a focus on the right set of traffic. With port consolidation, we are going to see massive freight movements between the ports and the cities – obviously, rail can haul that quite well and Auckland to Tauranga is a good example of what is possible. While we might not have the massive volumes of the Americans or even the Australians, we still have enough freight to haul around to ensure that rail is viable – of course, most of that potential freight members of the Green Party wouldn’t like.
With respect of the Queensland comments; given that the electric haulage is for the coal lines, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were used on a regular basis – if we looked at operations like that and the Pilbara operation for inspiration, we might actually get somewhere.
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john-ston says “Rail can make money in New Zealand, so long as there is a focus on the right set of traffic. With port consolidation, we are going to see massive freight movements between the ports and the cities – obviously, rail can haul that quite well and Auckland to Tauranga is a good example of what is possible.”
That’s been my point all along. In NZ rail needs to concentrate on where it IS efficient – bulk freight from point to point.
As for running the whole system, including all the unecomic parts – can that be profitable?
Well the government failed, Transrail failed, Toll failed, and now the government is failing again.
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photonz1 – did someone, somewhere, say that the whole system should be rail?
You seem to be basing your argument on that supposition.
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“That’s been my point all along. In NZ rail needs to concentrate on where it IS efficient – bulk freight from point to point.”
I would probably say that New Zealand could also do a decent job of consolidating loads going from point to point – with modern containers, the penalty for transferring from truck to train to truck is a lot less than it used to be. During the Burkhardt era at Tranz Rail, for instance, there was a service linking Auckland and Christchurch with a 24 hour timetable and it was apparently quite popular.
“As for running the whole system, including all the unecomic parts – can that be profitable?”
The uneconomic parts are generally few and far between; Napier to Gisborne will probably become economic in next year with the Hikurangi Forest development, the Stratford to Okahukura line should become economic if port consolidation went ahead and forestry would probably help the Pahiatua to Masterton Line.
The other thing which distorts the situation somewhat is the lack of modern rolling stock; the newest main-line diesel locomotive dates to 1981 and many of the wagons are 1970s or 1980s era. With modern locomotives and rolling stock, the system would become more economic (fewer breakdowns, greater efficiency, &c.)
“Well the government failed, Transrail failed, Toll failed, and now the government is failing again.”
Tranz Rail was succeeding before Burkhardt got rolled in 1999; had he been kept as CEO, it is probable that Tranz Rail would have carried on being a reasonably successful entity.
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john – ston – - you are making a massive assumption, that spending hundreds of millions in new rolling stock will make a massive difference in efficiency.
When you take cost of capital into account – it is very likely to do the opposite.
It’s a bit like saying we should all buy $160,000 BMW eco cars like the ministerial fleet, cause they will save on fuel. When in reality the additional cost of capital of each car is $10,000 per year, the depreciation is much more than that, but they only reduce consumption from $3000 down to $2000 of fuel per year – teno of thousands spent for every one thousand saved – what sounds good is actually a massive waste of money.
You say Kiwi Rails uneconmomic parts are few and far between. If this was true it would make money – it doesn’t.
If this is true then we can look forward to some good profits from Kiw Rail. Meanwhile back in the real world, the govt is throwing a BILLION dollars at KiwiRail, and they will STILL lose taxpayers money.
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greenfly – can you not reply without making a false arguement, then attributing it as my position?
If you actually do some reading, you see that I’ve repeatedly said that rail is good at point to point bulk loads.
We should put money into rail where it is efficient, but it is totally brainless to throw billions at rail in areas where it is not efficient.
Unfortunately there seems to be a green view that rail is much more efficient than trucks based on a simple litres per km arguement (like the aruenment used for the rediculously ecpensive ministerial BMWs).
And because of this we hear the mantra – “rail good – road bad” – without anybody actually engaging their brain and thinking about it.
Overall efficiency of rail in NZ is about as bad as is gets for any rail system in the world. And most of the factors that make it so, are not going to change.
We should use trains where they are more efficient, and trucks where they are more efficient – basic common sense really.
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Connections with the trucking industry, photonz1?
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Connections with the rail industry Greenfly?
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Connections with the trucking industry, photonz1?
Some kind of joke?
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greenfly says “Connections with the trucking industry, photonz1? ”
No greenfly. My connection is with rail. I used to work for them, including on the electrification project in the 80s.
So I’m fully versed in all the arguements FOR railways, but I’m also aware of which of those arguements are real and which are a bit hollow.
Electrification is expensive – massively expensive. It can typically run from $20 million to $100 million per kilometre. If you are going to spend that sort of money, then electrification needs to be MASSIVELY more efficient than deisel-electric.
The fact is that it is not, which is one of the reasons many lines that are ALREADY electrified, are reverting from electric to desiel electric (Victoria, NSW, and Otira – Arthurs Pass in NZ.
And that’s why many rail companies around the world who look at the advantages of electrification, do the maths and realise that the costs do not warrant the benefits.
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“It’s a bit like saying we should all buy $160,000 BMW eco cars like the ministerial fleet, cause they will save on fuel. When in reality the additional cost of capital of each car is $10,000 per year, the depreciation is much more than that, but they only reduce consumption from $3000 down to $2000 of fuel per year – teno of thousands spent for every one thousand saved – what sounds good is actually a massive waste of money.”
Not quite; the better analogy would be to buy new Toyota eco cars to replace cars bought in the 1970s – the rolling stock of Kiwi Rail is essentially the same as the rolling stock that NZR had, minus a large number of wagons that were sold and scrapped during the Beard era.
“You say Kiwi Rails uneconmomic parts are few and far between. If this was true it would make money – it doesn’t.”
The reason why it doesn’t make money is because it lacks rolling stock capacity – like I said many rolling stock items were sold or scrapped during the Beard era and they haven’t been replaced. Without the wagons to haul the freight, Kiwi Rail cannot do much (and that is not including the lack of locomotive capacity that we have had since 2004).
If we had additional rolling stock, then Kiwi Rail would be able to get additional traffic and given that many of Kiwi Rail’s costs are fixed, that would be additional profit. If the system was able to make a profit during the Burkhardt era, then why could it not today?
“If this is true then we can look forward to some good profits from Kiw Rail. Meanwhile back in the real world, the govt is throwing a BILLION dollars at KiwiRail, and they will STILL lose taxpayers money.”
Isn’t the billion to do with the Auckland electrification project? Certainly if a billion were to be thrown to Kiwi Rail for the purchase of new locomotives and wagons, we would start seeing some sort of return.
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john-stone – you say Kiwi Rails Roling stock is essentially the same as the 1970s.
What about the 20 new locos due to arrive, 10 new ones in 2006, 30 DFT class between 92-97, 15 in 1995, 25 QR class in 1995, etc
you say “Certainly if a billion were to be thrown to Kiwi Rail for the purchase of new locomotives and wagons, we would start seeing some sort of return.”
Yes – “some sort of return”.
But would it increase profits by $100m?
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“What about the 20 new locos due to arrive”
They are the first new diesel locomotives to arrive in New Zealand since 1981, and the first new locomotives to arrive in New Zealand since 1988.
“10 new ones in 2006″
There were no new locomotives in 2006
“30 DFT class between 92-97″
Those were rebuilds of the DF class of 1979-81 with turbocharged engines.
“15 in 1995″
Ha?
“25 QR class in 1995, etc”
Those were formerly 1460 and 1502 class locomotives from Queensland that dated to the 1960s – it doesn’t matter though, of that, 21 either ended up being scrapped or sent to Tasmania and only four remain in service in New Zealand. It is likely that we will probably see the remaining four retired either when the new DL class locomotives arrived, or after all the DCs and DFTs that are in Auckland get sent back to the freight pool after electrification.
“But would it increase profits by $100m?”
I couldn’t tell you exact figures; what I can say though is that most of the Burkhardt era traffic still exists and for instance, Tranz Rail had a profit of $70 million in 1999. Obviously with $1 billion of new locomotives and new rolling stock, the capacity to ship more freight would be even higher than it was in 1999.
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Wow – a $70m profit at a time when the Green Party was accussing Tranz Rail of assett stripping and failing to spend on infrastructure.
Followed shortly after by a $346million dollar LOSS for just HALF a year.
All this after being handed rail on a plate. The govt wrote off $1.3 BILLION of debt, spend $300 million on NZ rail, then sold it for not much more than what they had just spent.
Then Toll buys it for much less than tranz rail paid, the govt throws $200 million more at the tracks, and an experienced transport operator like Toll still can’t make a go of it.
Now it’s government owned, and it is making a profit again – BUT only if you count hundreds of millions ($425m) in taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies as income earned, AND if you ignore depreciation – the amount needed to keep the infrastructure sustainably maintained. SO in real terms it cost a couple of hundred million dollars more to run Kiwi Rail than it earned.
Any MAJOR spending on new rolling stock or track electrification for efficiency gains is not worth it. Currently Kiwi Rail spends $70M per year on electricity and diesel.
If you could cut that by a massive 15% over the WHOLE network, you’ll still only save $10m per year.
Is it worth spending billions of dollars to get a saving of $10m (well below 1%) when the assett you’ve just bought could be depreciating at $50-$100m per year (current assetts depreciate at over $200m per year).
It makes a mockery of the title of this thread.
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“Wow – a $70m profit at a time when the Green Party was accussing Tranz Rail of assett stripping and failing to spend on infrastructure.”
The asset stripping came later under the Beard era which started in 2000.
“Followed shortly after by a $346million dollar LOSS for just HALF a year.”
Much of that loss was a paper loss (due to the sale of the track infrastructure back to the government), although operational losses were largely caused by the inept way in which Beard did business – he literally drove rail customers away, and we both know that rail has high fixed costs – there were fewer customers to pay for the same amount of expenses, so what had been a decent profit four years earlier was now a sizeable loss.
Had many of those customers been kept, it is likely that Tranz Rail would have kept on making a profit into the future.
“Then Toll buys it for much less than tranz rail paid, the govt throws $200 million more at the tracks, and an experienced transport operator like Toll still can’t make a go of it.”
I would point out that initially Toll was making a decent go of it, but after their take over of Patrick Corporation (which apparently was a tough process and likely resulted in them paying too much for it) they lost their will power to carry on with the New Zealand market.
“Any MAJOR spending on new rolling stock or track electrification for efficiency gains is not worth it. Currently Kiwi Rail spends $70M per year on electricity and diesel.”
Where did I say track electrification? I merely said new locomotives and wagons for efficiency gains as well as being able to carry more goods
“If you could cut that by a massive 15% over the WHOLE network, you’ll still only save $10m per year.”
Again, it just isn’t for efficiency gains – one can also bring back the Burkhardt era customers back to rail. Hatuma Lime is such an example of a customer that has gone back to rail and is now helping to pay for the expenses of the entire system.
Bear in mind though that due to the age of many of the wagons, they have to face a certain direction – meaning that triangles at junctions are reasonably rare in New Zealand. Dealing with that problem alone would reduce a lot of shunting time at junctions such as Palmerston North.
“Is it worth spending billions of dollars to get a saving of $10m (well below 1%) when the assett you’ve just bought could be depreciating at $50-$100m per year (current assetts depreciate at over $200m per year).”
The goal isn’t so much to save money as it is to increase revenue – with rail, you can increase revenue without having expenses increase as rapidly due to the high level of fixed costs. With additional wagons, we can get additional customers onto rail.
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john-ston – I’m not against spending on rail. Simply that if we do spend, then there has to be a reasonable return on our investment.
Time and time and tima again we have thrown very large amounts of money at rail, with no return.
Do we not currently have a system where the NI Main trunk line starts with electric in Wellington, changes to diesel-electric, changes back to electric (but at a different voltage requiring different locos), then back to deisel again – so a simple Wellington to Auckland trip will require FOUR different locomotives.
I reiterate – spend on rail if it will get a decent return on our money. If we spend a billion on rolling stock, but can’t bring in much more business, then just like every time in the past – we are just throwing billions more down the rail money drain.
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The first test of any investment is “Can the revenues pay for the cost of the capital?”
If they cannot then you can put the calculator away and find some other project to investigate.
If an investment cannot pay the cost of capital then it actually destroys wealth and in particular it destroys savings (whether govt or private does not matter) and we are short of savings and cannot afford to flush what little we have down the toilet.
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I don’t think return on investment (as measured in $$) should be the only or even the main aspect of a decision about how we want our society to function. The dominance of economics over all aspects of government causes all kinds of problems.
What is the return on investment of having a child? Or growing a vegetable garden? Yet people do them, in vast numbers
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So whose savings are you prepared to destroy to keep a trainset running when obviously transport users prefer other means?
And why?
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rimu – with rail, you may want to add to the return additional factors like savings on road maintenance, and carbon reductions – but the calculations DO need to be done.
Otherwise you end up throwing billions of dollars down the drain (as has been done in the past) with not a lot to show for it except a good feeling for some people that it was probably the right thing to do.
The return on having a child is that the species survives.
The return on growing food is that the species survives.
The return on spending a billion dollars on rail that doesn’t make much of a difference, and doesn’t take much freight off trucks, is a billion wasted when it could have been spent on areas where it could make a much bigger difference.
So the benefits – financial and otherwise – need to be measured carefully otherwise you have a government that spends willy nilly with massive inefficiency.
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“Time and time and tima again we have thrown very large amounts of money at rail, with no return.”
That is because we have thrown money at incredibly stupid things to do with rail – for instance, North Island Main Trunk electrification. If we had spent the money at that point in time on improving the loading gauge and axle loads on that run (the alternative proposal involved narrow gauge versions of the SD-40s), then it would have been far more useful.
“Do we not currently have a system where the NI Main trunk line starts with electric in Wellington, changes to diesel-electric, changes back to electric (but at a different voltage requiring different locos), then back to deisel again – so a simple Wellington to Auckland trip will require FOUR different locomotives.”
Actually, it would only require three different locomotives – freight trains have not been electric hauled in the Wellington area since the Tawa Tunnels were lowered in the mid 1960s. Obviously, North Island Main Trunk electrification was one of the stupid things that money was thrown at but now we are stuck with it.
“I reiterate – spend on rail if it will get a decent return on our money. If we spend a billion on rolling stock, but can’t bring in much more business, then just like every time in the past – we are just throwing billions more down the rail money drain.”
That I do not have a problem with; however, I am reasonably confident that a billion on new rolling stock would provide Kiwi Rail with the capacity to attract new customers (especially the Burkhardt era ones). Those additional customers would almost entirely be bringing in new revenue.
As strange as this may sound, I am in favour of ensuring that money spent on Kiwi Rail achieves a reasonable level of return; that is why I am cautious about keeping lines open that aren’t attracting much in the way of traffic.
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The return on any investment in rail will look more attractive
ifwhen the price of oil climbs through $US200 per barrel.Trevor.
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john-ston – changing the gauge is another deisrable aim, at least in theory.
But the practicality of the changeover – closing down the whole system for perhaps a year, would likely be a deathblow for rail
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As the wider gauge has a far greater minimum radii curve then the existing 3’6″ one, almost every bridge, viaduct, cutting and tunnel will need to be replaced.
Required re-alignment will see major earthworks plus land currently used for conservation, farming, towns, cities and boroughs, plus relocation of countless homes and businesses.
Try sticking a wider 4’8″ gauge through the narrow coastal channel available down the Kaikoura coast. Count the tunnels you would require!! Not to mention unavailable land for the greater radii curves. Plus major road realignment to cater for the extra room required for the rail (unless you close the road and force people to use the railway).
But who needs the seal colonies down that coast anyway. Lets build a rail system.
Be interesting to see what the coast line into Wellington would look like in a wider gauge.
But hey wait a minute, will it fit up transmission gulley? Earthworks for a new road happening soon. Will there be the foresight to include a rail line provision for future use?
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“john-ston – changing the gauge is another deisrable aim, at least in theory.”
You misread my comment – I made reference to changing the loading gauge – think things like the size of tunnels, &c. At the present, parts of the New Zealand rail system cannot accommodate modern containers because the tunnels on those routes are so small – two examples that immediately spring to mind are the Midland Line (Tunnel #1) and the North Auckland Line (Makarau Tunnel).
“But the practicality of the changeover – closing down the whole system for perhaps a year, would likely be a deathblow for rail’
Again, changing the loading gauge is relatively easy – it was done in the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate the Da class locomotives, and has been done on some lines in recent times to accommodate modern containers (as well as the ex-Perth DMUs and BR carriages, both of which are technically out of gauge).
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john-stone – sorry I should have picked up the difference, especially since I used to work checking if oversized loads could be carried, as well as on increasing track clearances.
Gerrit – if we don’t change the gauge (and I think it would be completely impractical to do so), then we will always be contrained by a relatively slow speed system.
I presume you jest about transmission gully having a rail corridor?
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No not really though I dont know the topography or practicality.
All I know is there is going to be massive earthworks for a motorway and while digging make provisions for ALL other services.
Rail, power, water, telecommunications, etc. (bike track?)
A classsic exaple where this was not done was the Waikato Expressway. While doing the eathworks how hard would it have been to dig a bit deeper and put a service tunnel in for the high tension powerlines that are soon to blot the Waikato landscape.
Future proofing is all we ask for.
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“No not really though I dont know the topography or practicality”
Gerrit, there are concerns that Transmission Gully will be too steep for trucks – the only way that it would be practical for trains is if we used some form of additional adhession (either a rack rail or a Fell centre rail).
Apparently some tunnelling could be done on the Muri to Paekakariki route to duplicate that line – it would be pretty pricey though.
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Burying high tension power lines for long distances is totally impractical. Apart from the enormous cost of doing so, the losses are significantly higher. Where the power lines go under the ocean, there may be no practical alternative, and it may be done for short distances in urban areas but for miles of countryside – forget it!
Trevor.
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Trevor29
You are wrong on the potential losses count. There are no losses underground.
What is lost is the ability to increase power (overclocking the line capacity in other words) over the line for short periods (to meet peak demand) due to increased heat build up.
The other complaint is servicing the cables. This is not a problem (as is heat dispersement) if the cables are placed in a tunnel like the 30k long Auckland urban one.
Low level wooly negative thinking like yours stops development. Think positive. How much extra would it have taken while doing the road earthworks to have dug down and placed a tunnel down the side of the road? This cost versus the cost of a string of 300 metre(?) towers.
Not to mention the savings in the Waikato vista from ugly metal creations. Surely the Greens must be against the spoiling of the vista?
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See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
“Undergrounding is more expensive, since the cost of burying cables at transmission voltages is several times greater than overhead power lines, and the life-cycle cost of an underground power cable is two to four times the cost of an overhead power line. Above ground lines cost around $10 per foot and underground lines cost in the range of $20 to $40 per foot.[3]” (Those would be US dollars.)
and in particular
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses
“Also, at high AC voltages, significant (although economically acceptable) amounts of energy are lost due to corona discharge, the capacitance between phases or, in the case of buried cables, between phases and the soil or water in which the cable is buried.”
Where do you get your information from Gerrit?
Trevor.
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Trevor29,
The wikipedia article comncentrates soly on BURIED high tension cables.
I’m proposing a tunnel system
To view the options see here on a discussion on the three different methods available and the magnetic field problems.
http://www.emfs.info/Sources+of+EMFs/Underground/ugtypes.htm
Also note that in a full buried system the cables are gas cooled.
Any links on wikipedia on tunneled cables?
Have a look at what is planned to join Russia with Alaska. Including high tension power lines in the worlds longest tunnel.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a0bsMii8oKXw
I got my techical information here (pdf sorry)
http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/A7B84851-242F-496B-A5E8-697331E15504/36546/UndergroundingTheTechnicalIssues1.pdf
It is possible but without the willpower nothing is done.
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http://www.mfe.govt.nz/rma/call-in-transpower/board-of-inquiry/submitter-evidence/downloads/catherine-tuck.pdf
Transpower’s proposed pylons are 60-70m, not 300m.
Trevor.
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http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6921319/new-rail-link-will-save-100-000-truck-trips-a-year/
re a new rail link between the Port of Auckland and the Wiri freight hub in south Auckland.
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One of the advantages of underground transmission lines is greater reliability. Seems the overhead lines are vulnerable to ice loading plus high winds. I remember a lot of lines being affected in Canterbury one winter, and the Desert road area certainly suffers from lots of ice. However I don’t recall ice on transmission lines being a significant issue in the Waikato.
What you can’t do with an underground transmission line is upgrade it to a higher power rating easily. The insulated cables are expensive and have to be totally replaced to increase the voltage, and if you want to increase the power without increasing the voltage you need to run higher currents, which requires either replacing the cables or running additional cables in parallel. There are no cheap upgrades for underground cables. However the overhead lines can be reconductored more cheaply as the cables are much cheaper (no insulation and smaller conductors).
Trevor.
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photonz,
maybe if the AA realeased figures showing the number of trucks involved
in fatal accidents in this country, as often as the police have for acusing
“speed” and “alcohol” as factors, the public would demand an investigation
into the entire trucking industry and the subsidies they recieve.
Truck drivers try their best, it’s not a personal vendetta I have here,
but a 22 metre truck on a two lane road is a recipe for death.
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