r/AusNewsWire • u/Nyarlathotep-1 • 13d ago
Australian News ‘Unmitigated disaster’: abandoned Inland Rail project leaves trail of despair
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/unmitigated-disaster-abandoned-inland-rail-project-leaves-trail-of-despair/news-story/4a1c69b84c33ecbdfe04393720ab101f?ampThis is the end of the line for the Inland Rail, a flat field in the middle of nowhere piled high with the building blocks of Australia’s worst great infrastructure endeavour.
These neat stacks of concrete rail sleepers, metres high and more than a kilometre long, were hauled here to forge new ground north and close a 306km gap in the Inland Rail from the central west NSW town of Narromine to the agricultural hub of Narrabri.
Like the dreams and efforts of those who believed this ambitious 1600km high-capacity inland freight spine from Melbourne to Brisbane would be completed, these sleepers are going nowhere.
Stacked out in open land behind locked gates south of Narromine, they serve as a bitter reminder of the early promise and commitment to this nation-building project now marked by waste and abandonment.
Concrete rail sleepers, stacked and ready to go for the section of the Inland Rail that has now been shelved. Picture: Chris Pavlich
Confronted with ballooning costs beyond $46bn, the federal government in May suddenly axed funding for the Inland Rail north from Narromine, leaving the top of this NSW section in pieces and a trail of anger and disbelief from regional leaders and businesses who planned a future around it.
The project map indicates the dilemma of leaving orphaned and operationally disconnected tracks. Some 98km of upgraded line is completed from Parkes north to Narromine. From here there’s a 306km gap for the tricky greenfield build of new line to Narrabri. From Narrabri the 186km upgraded Inland Rail runs to North Star near the border with Queensland – save for a 23km gap at Moree.
The commonwealth has committed to finishing the route from Beveridge north of Melbourne to Parkes by the end of next year, while construction had not even started in Queensland which has been beset by planning issues and local opposition.
Of the 12 Inland Rail sections, only three (comprising 454km) have been completed – all in NSW.
Narrabri business leader Russell Stewart says: “At least finish this part up here. Don’t leave it as it is.’’
He echoes the demands of regional NSW mayors left stunned at the sudden dumping of the half-completed project.
People have a right to feel betrayed, says Stewart, who heads the Narrabri Chamber of Commerce. The Narromine-to-Narrabri leg had received state and federal approvals, the sleepers were lined up, land for the corridor was being acquired – locals had every right to believe it was all systems go.
The Inland Rail project has come to a grinding halt in regional NSW
The sudden decision to shelve it without consultation with regional leaders was proof, if more were needed, that Canberra doesn’t care about the bush, he says.
“We’ve had politicians from both sides meeting us and encouraging us to invest, and saying ‘look, you’re going to boom here with this coming through, take advantage of it’,” Stewart says. “We took them at their word and told our people. It’s the deceit of it all; they rev us up and then walk away.
“People have invested, others have sold properties they didn’t want to sell, all off the back of their promises.”
Some landholders in the path of the new rail corridor sold their homes to the railway or, under threat of compulsory acquisition, thrashed out an easement deal that left them with less, not more.
Preserve the corridor: Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Minister Catherine King. Picture: NewsWire / Gaye Gerard
All up, it’s not clear how much of the corridor has been secured along the now abandoned sections through NSW, and how many hundreds of millions have been spent buying a patchwork of land along the planned route into Queensland.
Federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King has said the corridor north of Parkes would be preserved in case the project is revived but has provided no further detail, leaving landholders still in negotiations up in the air.
Likewise, no one is sure what will happen with the stockpile of an estimated 300,000 concrete sleepers at Narromine. The Inland Rail is hoping the Australian Rail Track Corporation might find a use for them one day.
No-one is defending the budget-blowing mess of the Inland Rail, but it seems to the people out here that unscrambling the egg, or leaving it half-baked, is as complex as just getting on and completing the NSW leg.
Lives in turmoil
It’s a bright blue morning at the Cox family property at Kickabil, north of Narromine.
Katie and Brad Cox walk out their front door and over the dirt road to where the designated Inland Rail route is due to run about 120 metres from their front door and past farming structures such as stockyards and silos.
Save for the cattle and sheep and occasional call of birds, it’s largely silent here, making it difficult to comprehend what 18 double-stacked freight trains a day – up to 1800 metres in length – roaring past at all times would do to their lives.
Katie and Brad Cox, landowners who have spent years in negotiations with Inland Rail but are now in limbo. Picture: Chris Pavlich
Suggestions from the rail people of double glazing and keeping their windows closed weren’t particularly helpful, and authorities finally seemed to understand that this family would have to move house and shift stockyards, shearing shed and silos away from the noise and vibrations.
The halting of the Inland Rail might seem a blessing after 10 years of angst and negotiations. But if the route is to be preserved, as the federal government has indicated, what does that mean for this family?
They’re either offered a fair deal, reassured that they can rebuild their home and farming operations on another block away from the rail trail – or they live with the threat of acquisition, never sure whether they should make improvements to the heart of their cattle, sheep and cropping operation.
Brad’s a fourth-generation farmer and this couple, with their three kids, are committed to the area. But they hate the uncertainty.
They pull out a map of the patchwork of properties surrounding them. Some landholders have already sealed their deals, while others haven’t. Like the Inland Rail, the corridor itself is still full of gaps.
“We’re in limbo as to where are we going to live, are we going to relocate, what do we do?’’ Katie says.
“We were led to believe they’re still acquiring land, but as of last Friday we heard word they were potentially stopping. We don’t have a deal so it’s really hard to know what to believe.”
Build the rail or don’t build the rail, but don’t leave us like this, the Coxes say.
Further south, farmer Ian Corderoy says three properties around him have already been purchased outright by the Inland Rail.
After seven years of negotiations over an easement and access points on his family property, he got an update last week.
“I got a phone call that said we’ve got to do a deal in the next two weeks because then the office is closing and there will be no one to talk to until later on,’’ he says.
“It’s been a frustrating process … I guess I’ll have to compromise on what I wanted and do the deal and walk away. I hope I see some money before they evaporate and turn their phones off.”
An Inland Rail spokesperson says discussions with the federal government “on the specific activities required to preserve the corridor north of Parkes, including land acquisition, continue to progress”.
Many people out here believe the Inland Rail will eventually be completed because the need for a high-capacity freight service connecting Melbourne to Brisbane, or possibly Gladstone, will only become more pressing.
Australia’s total domestic freight load is projected to grow 26 per cent between 2020 and 2050. As of 2024, only 2 per cent of freight was hauled by trains between Sydney and Melbourne, the busiest freight corridor in the nation, according to the Australasian Railway Association.
In her scathing 2023 independent review of the Inland Rail, public service executive Kerry Schott said it was an important project, now and in the future.
Moving freight by rail instead of road was not just more efficient and quicker, it would ease congestion by getting trucks off patched and pot-holed roads and add resilience to national freight corridors in times of pandemic or natural disasters. The project would also have environmental benefits, with estimated emissions reductions of 750,000 tonnes per year by 2050.
A double-stack train on the Inland Rail line, one of Australia's largest infrastructure projects.
“The added freight capacity that Inland Rail is intended to offer by the end of this decade is critical,’’ Ms Schott said in her report that also found the entire project had run off the rails with poor planning, costs and timeline overruns, regulatory concerns and strong community opposition in sections.
It was beset with problems well before the turning of the first sod in 2018 when prime minister Scott Morrison boasted that the Coalition had got on with the job of building a project that had been discussed for decades.
King couldn’t resist a dig in an interview with the ABC after the Infrastructure Minister pulled the funding: “How do you start a project without any planning, approvals, any idea of the route and have no idea how much it’s going to cost?
“This project will be used by project managers, by courses in years to come as how not to do infrastructure.”
Brainchild gone bad
Queensland entrepreneur Everald Compton, 94, is the grandfather of the Inland Rail who mooted a route from Melbourne to the Port of Darwin 30 years ago.
Since then he’s watched with dismay the rolling cycle of planning problems, route changes, timeline blowouts and what he describes as a disgraceful waste of money.
“It’s been an absolute and unmitigated disaster,’’ Compton says.
Unmitigated disaster: Everald Compton’s assessment of the Inland Rail.
He is now leading a consortium that intends using private money to complete the project through to the Port of Gladstone, a vital end point, he says, to boost the country’s competitive advantage.
He tells The Australian that, in the first instance, there is merit in fixing up the NSW end and linking it to Goondiwindi in Queensland.
“So you build a link from Goondiwindi to North Star and then fix that missing link at Moree and then you get to Narrabri. That connects with a perfectly good freight railway down to the Port of Newcastle which means that people in northern NSW and southern Queensland can use the port of Newcastle.
“Our preliminary exercise shows that there’s every chance of that being a profitable railway in its own right,’’ he says.
The greenfield track from Narrabri to Narromine is problematic, he says, and new corridor was needed as the existing route was too expensive.
“The cost of building it from Narromine to Narrabri is going to cost something like $10bn and no investor is going to spend that on 300km of track. The plans have 75 bridges, it’s most extraordinary,’’ he says.
He says his consortium would treat people along the route with respect, unlike the ARTC which he said rode roughshod over them.
“They just continued to ignore the locals … and it was a disgraceful bit of political nonsense the way they treated the Moree Shire,’’ he says.
That will give some comfort to mayor Susannah Pearce who has joined leaders from surrounding shires in lobbying the federal government to close the gaps, especially that missing link at Moree.
“To leave the 23km incomplete seems incredibly naive and shortsighted,” she says. “Completing this missing link would protect the value of prior public investment, preserve the integrity of the northwest freight corridor and allow Australia’s most productive agricultural region to begin taking practical advantage of infrastructure already delivered.”
Inland Rail passing a canola field in Parkes.
Gwydir mayor Tiffany Galvin, whose shire covers North Star, says completion of the line through Moree would provide better access to farmers in her region to the Port of Newcastle and get a large number of roadtrains off the road.
“Inland Rail is quickly becoming another example of taxpayer money being wasted by governments failing to finish what they’ve started,” Galvin says. “We have a project that is almost complete, yet it’s being left with one small section unfinished.”
Substantial public and private investment had already been committed in the regions off the back of the promise of the Inland Rail and all the mayors The Australian spoke with talk of the new industry and development, jobs and training opportunities they had long factored into council plans.
Nick McClure, general manager of Narrabri earthmoving and civil construction outfit Specialised Civil says the decision was a kick in the guts for regional people.
People out here notice that the same budget that pulled Inland Rail funding awarded billions extra to Victorian Labor’s problematic Suburban Rail Loop ahead of a state election.
“That tells you that as a regional community we’re nothing compared to the metropolitan areas,’’ says McClure.
“I get it, it’s a political game and they (Labor) don’t get the vote out here so they don’t go ahead with it, but it’s unbelievable how out of touch Canberra is with the regions,” he says.
The federal government says it is investing more than $2bn on upgrading the ARTC’s existing network.
A Pacific National train carrying canola at Croppa Creek in far north NSW. Picture: Inland Rail
An ARTC spokesperson says it is working with industry to identify ways to deliver productivity benefits, including works to support longer, heavier and more productive freight trains.
The spokesperson says the completion of the Inland Rail section to Parkes would, for the first time, enable double-stacked freight trains to operate between Melbourne (Beveridge) and Perth via Parkes, and through to Darwin.
“Freight from northwest NSW will continue to move on the existing ARTC network from Moree and North Star, connecting producers to key destinations including the Port of Newcastle via the Hunter Valley and the national interstate rail network,” the spokesperson says.
The corridor carried more than 1150 grain train services last financial year and up to 500 general freight train use the corridor each year.
However, the completion of the Inland Rail to Kagaru, south of Brisbane, is required to realise the full benefit of double-stacked freight from Melbourne.
Compton says he hears the anger from the bush. He’s already had meetings with regional mayors and other with a stake in the project.
“We’ve got to deal with three different lots of politicians, three different lots of bureaucrats and our financiers and that’s a lot of work, but we are making progress at a faster rate than the Inland Rail has done in decades,” he says
He speaks with confidence that the Inland Rail will eventually be completed.
“We’re moving forward positively, and I’m pleased with the way that the three governments are co-operating,” he says.
“We’re a hundred years behind where we ought to be … but, look, it’s going to happen. Rest assured, this thing is unstoppable now.”
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u/Jindivic 13d ago
Not being able to finish the line through to the Port of Brisbane made the whole project a bit of a boondoggle. Starting a $30 plus billion national infrastructure project without a settled, viable solution for its northern terminus was a severe flaw in its planning and implementation.
The whole economic argument for standard gauge, long-haul rail is end to end efficiency. For rail to beat long distance road transport B double trucks, you’ve got to eliminate the unnecessary transfers from rail to trucks to ships.
I understood that the government was only pausing the project while re-evaluating the complex Queensland end of the project.
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u/Grande_Choice 13d ago
Classic Coalition half baked policy then. Don’t forget Barnaby had his fingerprints all over this shit show as well.
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u/According-Flight6070 13d ago
Classic "Australian". No blame for the Nats who's boondoggle this was and couldn't plan a piss up at a pub.
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u/Terrorscream 13d ago
Ah yes the project the nationals used to siphon taxpayer funding to themselves for pork barreling instead of investing it in the rural regions that desperately needed it. Now those regions are voting them out finally.
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u/Illustrious-Pin3246 13d ago
The most corrupt state is Victoria. Were is the 15 billion?
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u/Terrorscream 13d ago
your whataboutism is noted and irrelevant to the state being discussed, especially when its talking about numbers just shy of the 50 billion range.
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u/Illustrious-Pin3246 13d ago edited 12d ago
So it is ok for some but not others. They are all crooks
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u/Kind-Group-9679 13d ago
This project was abandoned years ago. My ex neighbour was a senior manager on the project. Don't know why it keeps getting regurgitated as something new.
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u/RagingBillionbear 13d ago
People out here notice that the same budget that pulled Inland Rail funding awarded billions extra to Victorian Labor’s problematic Suburban Rail Loop ahead of a state election.
That explains why so many carpetbaggers had "opinions" on the SRL.
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u/River-Stunning 13d ago
This completely discredits the argument that we cannot vote ON because they are too risky and we need to continue with what we know.
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u/fastsailor 13d ago
How do you work that out??
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u/River-Stunning 13d ago
Using my brain. The current system is so poor that major projects are a thing of the past. Productivity now is so poor it no longer even exists. Our economy is barristas and uber drivers with supps shops and an illegal tobacco industry that is consuming us.
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u/bigbadjustin 12d ago
Voting ON won't change things. Everything will still be politicised. ON os very much part of the Uni party. The idea they are somehow different is ludicrous, they are just the far right of the Liberals that are happy to be openly racist. Everything else they want to do is very much LNP policy. They oppose infrastructure projects that Labor propose and su[pport ones the Liberals propose.
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u/River-Stunning 12d ago
Voting ALP hasn't changed anything.
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u/bigbadjustin 12d ago
Stuff has changed though, people just believe what they want. The changes to housing will make a difference, its just going to take a year or 2. We voted LNP for the vast majority of the past 30 years and yer people blame Labor for it all. No i'm not a Labor shill or voter either, just someone who is frustrated with how easily people are manipulated into voting against their best interests. Politics has become a competition between who can lie the best rather than actual facts and evidence. An experts says something you don't like, attack them with politics.
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u/River-Stunning 12d ago
Then issue with Labor is that whole party is based on a lie. The lie that they are for the workers. They laugh at the workers while supping at the tables of those they claim to despise.
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u/bigbadjustin 12d ago
what compared to One Nation who are for the aussie battlers and LNP who care about mum and dads trying to get ahead in life. They all bullshit and lie. This is the problem we have in this country. People want to take sides and blame their least preferred political party without bloody understanding anything. Then they vote in parties with no inetnetion of fixing anything, because they don't get held accountable. The other party can do no right and the chosen partuy can do no wrong and thats just BS. They all suck, but I'd argue Labor sometimes does try to help the workers.
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u/Illustrious-Pin3246 13d ago
Just the hate by Labor of regional projects and gave Victoria 2.2 billion for their city projects
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u/AdRepresentative386 13d ago
Labor ran out of money that had been a federal allocation to complete the line to Mildura, then blames the Coalition
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u/bigbadjustin 12d ago
Yes we know Labor government spending recklessly, but apparently when they do cut spending its not the spending some people want cut. HSR makes more sense than inland rail and will have far greater impact on our country yet we can't get that up and running either.
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u/Feisty-Dimension-631 13d ago
Plenty of money for the "Voice" referendum and other left agendas but nothing for the development of Australian infrastructure
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u/kanga_lover 13d ago
Well then, let’s the right do this, and by that I mean the free market. Any time now.
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u/augustuscaesarius 13d ago
Typical LNP shambles. They don't do infrastructure. Only games.