News organisations love to thrill themselves don't they? The engineering studies for a Coledale-Waterfall bypass have been in the public domain for over a decade. It's just that everybody is now busy digging them out again. The study is: Connell Wagner, South Coast corridor-Rail improvement-Thirroul tunnel study (2003).

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/03/1044122321315.html http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/03/1044122321315.html

The route wouldn't be quite that conjectured on a map by the ABC, it would hug the existing rail line more closely. It is a difficult task. The line goes along the edge of a scarp, the scree slope of which is slowly sliding into the sea. However the alternative of going under the plateau is stymied by the fact that it has all been undermined by coal mining since the 19th century and it is not safe to build a tunnel through it. It's one of those between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place engineering tasks in which has route has to be carefully chosen to pick a path between one problem and the other.

The railway was built during a prolonged dry spell in the 19th century. When the rains finally came and it started sliding into the sea, they realised their mistake, but by that time the coal mining had started. The English author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a graphic piece about it.

The other problem is that since they got rid of the electric locos for freight, it would be difficult to get diesels through such a long tunnel, so it really needs the Maldon-Dombarton freight railway built in tandem as well. Fortunately it's now brewing up into a big political storm on the south coast and the political path to completing a motorway to the gates of the Sydney CBD is going to be a rough one and hopefully unsuccessful.

It's also coming out in the press (and I've observed this personally) that a number of commuter services between Sydney and Wollongong have people standing for the entire 80 km journey between the two cities, that's for 1.5 hours. The much-maligned Sydney Metro with its (allegedly) seat-deficient single-deckers doesn't hold a candle to this!.

The general lack of performance by the Lumbering Giants Rail Corporation (aka Sydney/NSW Trains) isn't confined to the curvy bits either. 80% of the south coast line is actually pretty much straight. As I've pointed out previously, if you take two very similarly-profiled sections of the Mandurah line in Perth and the NSW south coast rail, you get this:

Perth-Warnbro vs Thirroul-Bombo, both 47 km with 9 intermediate stops and both with trains approved for 130 km/h running.

Perth-Warnbro: 38 minutes.
Thirroul-Bombo: 48-54 minutes.

Tony P
---InTramsDownUnder@..., <arg@...> wrote :

Deceit and corruption - core values of the NSW kleptocracy :

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-27/secret-rail-tunnel-from-wollongong-to-sydney-revealed/8653008 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-27/secret-rail-tunnel-from-wollongong-to-sydney-revealed/8653008

Tony G