As Track + Signal enters its 20th year, the subject of high-speed rail remains front and centre. Is there a role for magnetic levitation in Australasia? What form should a new HSR terminal take in Sydney? Tim Fischer, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and renowned rail book author, weighs up the achievements and missed opportunities of the past 20 years, and infrastructure developments are examined with a particular emphasis on the needs of freight operators and their clients.This issue includes a bumper report on the AusRAIL Plus 2015 conference and exhibition and a preview of the Railway Technical Society of Australasia's Conference on Railway Excellence 2016.

With the opening of its main section to Randwick scheduled to take place in early December, Sydney CBD and South East Light Rail has been busy training drivers, testing systems and vehicles and having the newly-completed track ground from end to end by Speno Rail Maintenance Australia to remove construction debris. Work by KiwiRail and its project partners in the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery Alliance to restore the railway line between Picton and Christchurch devastated by the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake has won a prestigious North American rail industry award. Tim Fischer AC – railway advocate and enthusiast, former deputy prime minister and a universally respected human being – lost his battle with an acute form of leukaemia on 22 August in Albury, New South Wales, at the age of 73. He never missed an opportunity to speak on the benefits of rail. Australian Airports Association CEO Caroline Wilkie will take over as chief executive officer of the Australasian Railway Association. Ms Wilkie will assume her Canberra-based appointment in mid February.

Rail is booming in New Zealand, where the Wairoa–Napier line has been reopened to logging traffic, optimism and confidence were the order of the day at the annual industry conference in June, a section of tunnel under the Auckland CBD has been completed as part of the City Rail Link project and the historic Dunedin station continues to serve the public as a multipurpose venue as well as a key transport hub. In Australia, a summit for current and emerging female leaders in rail, roads and transport infrastructure has provided a platform for the sharing of advice in Sydney and a similar event is now being planned to take place in Melbourne. Infrastructure investment by governments and private financiers is enabling track and associated facility expansion throughout Australasia (such as in north-west Sydney, where the country's first driverless passenger train is operational). In regional Australia, Goulburn has marked the 150th anniversary of the first train's arrival in that inland city and The Ghan service between Adelaide and Darwin is being celebrated on a new commemorative 50-cent coin.

The New South Wales Government launched Newcastle's controversial light rail project with a free community open day. Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Transport Minister Andrew Constance said the event was a chance to celebrate the completion of the project and "thank the people for their tolerance during construction".  Elsewhere, the Australian Capital Territory gave its new Metro Light Rail users one month's free travel, and in Melbourne, with more than 220 delegates attending and a technical site tour to Bombardier Transportation Australia's plant in Dandenong heavily oversubscribed, the Australasian Railway Association's Light Rail 2019 was impressive. Overseas,  Asia Pacific Rail in Hong Kong attracted more than 70 exhibitors and features four premium conference streams and four seminar sessions.  And in regional Victoria, half a century after the fact, the role of the Violet Town community in assisting survivors of one of Australia's biggest rail tragedies – the collision between the Southern Aurora interstate express passenger service and a goods train – was recognised with a series of commemorative events.

Light rail is front and centre, with updates on the progress of the Sydney CBD and South East, Parramatta and Newcastle projects. AusRAIL 2018 is reviewed in detail in a 12-page section packed with photographs and observations from the Australasian rail industry's biggest annual conference and exhibition. Bentley Systems' Year in Infrastructure awards and conference highlights the achievements of teams around the world using the company's software applications. The Rail Track Association Australia's biennial field day  has gone from strength to strength in its 13-year history and will be held again at the start of April in its traditional home at the rail yards in Clyde, Sydney.

On 10 July the world’s ﬁrst fully autonomous, long-distance heavy-haul rail movement was run by miner Rio Tinto from Tom Price to port on the Western Australia coast. Carrying some 28,000t of iron ore, the unmanned train was managed remotely by controllers in the company’s operations centre 1500km away in Perth. In preparation for the 24 November state election, Melbourne was almost overwhelmed with rail and light rail plans in September and October – some planned, others unsolicited. These included the state government released an ambitious 30-year, $50 billion plan to build a circle line linking every suburban train line and Melbourne Airport, the entire project being dependent on the Labor government being re-elected. At the same time, the rail lobby group Rail Futures Institute unveiled its plan for Melbourne’s transport future covering from now until 2050, designed to change the existing radial rail network to a cross-city grid network. Australian rail suppliers, operators and organisations showcased their combined capability to more than 161,000 attendees at the world’s biggest trade fair for railway technology, InnoTrans 2018, in Berlin, Germany, in September. The Australasian Railway Association led a delegation of more than 30 companies collaborating to present the Australian Rail Industry pavilion in one of the event's main buildings.

During a two-day conference in Parkes, New South Wales, stakeholders including contractors, local government authorities and potential clients have been updated on progress on Inland Rail, the ambitious project to link Australia's east-coast capitals Melbourne and Brisbane with a 24-hour north-south freight rail service. Across the Tasman, New Zealand's annual rail conference has delivered a buoyant outlook for the industry, with positive announcements on a new plan to include rail in that country's national land transport strategy. Throughout Australia, government budget commitments have allocated significant funds to rail upgrading or expansion. Female rail leaders have shared advice and experiences through a national summit in Sydney, and members and guests of the Railway Technical Society of Australasia have celebrated a successful biennial conference and associated exhibition on rail engineering, CORE, in Sydney.

The Australasian Railway Association's Light Rail 2018 conference has attracted record interest, demonstrating the importance of this mode of public transport both throughout Australia and New Zealand and around the world. As the two countries prepare to celebrate Anzac Day, the wartime contributions of rail professionals are remembered. The value of diversity across the workforce is highlighted through a move to combat the gender pay gap and a networking lunch for industry members, male and female alike.

AusRAIL PLUS, the conference of the Australasian Railway Association, attracted a record number of industry attendees to the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre in November. Both event dinners were sold out, the exhibition hall hosted more than 360 companies showing off rail products and services, and almost 1000 delegates took part in conference sessions over three days. Exactly a century after its completion, the Trans-Australian Railway was commemorated in four centres in October as crowds remembered the ambitious undertaking that linked Australia's east and west coasts by rail. Present-day infrastructure projects are equally impressive: in Melbourne the installation of a section of elevated track as part of Victoria's level crossings removal is progressing quickly, and in New South Wales the first consignment of steel for Inland Rail has been delivered. A high-speed service between Sydney and Melbourne has the support of 13 companies that have pledged support to a proposal to link the two capitals via eight new cities to be built along the rail route.

Rail’s influence worldwide was growing, not declining, and continued to underpin industrial growth particularly in the developing nations of Asia and Africa, Australia's Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development, Anthony Albanese, told the Australasian Railway Association’s inaugural Rail Freight Conference and Exhibition in Sydney. The industry achievements of Speno Rail Maintenance Australia's long-time CEO Ben Lombardo were recognised at the Australasian Rail Industry Awards gala dinner when he was honoured for his outstanding career achievement and innovation. The New Zealand Government will add a third rail line between Westfield and Wiri in Auckland as part of a funding package to help cope with the city’s rapid growth. This welcome announcement came shortly after delegates at the New Zealand Rail event pondered how to cope with an influx of visitors attending New Zealand’s defence of the America’s Cup yachting title in 2021, with news of the competition victory coinciding with the opening of the conference. French train-maker Alstom turned on a party to celebrate the centenary of the Ballarat Train Workshops in rural Victoria, involving workers both present and past, suppliers and the local community. The party celebrated the pivotal role the workshops have had in the life of the city of Ballarat as well as their contribution to Victoria generally through the transfer of skills and apprenticeships. Alstom purchased the workshops in 1999 and since then has won orders from the Victorian Government to manufacture a total of 101 X’Trapolis train sets.


The Australian Government has put its money where its mouth is by pledging $8.4 billion for the Inland Rail project as part of an infrastructure spending spree in the federal budget. The balance of the cost of the $10b project will come from the private sector. If the rail industry wants to have existing standards amended to cut the frequency of human inspections of track, it will need to present a business case to the regulator detailing the merits of such a move. This was the message to given to participants in a full-day workshop at Monash University, Melbourne, on track maintenance standards and their relevance to modern railways, hosted by the university's Institute of Railway Technology. Sydney’s Central Station will receive a new underground concourse designed to give passengers better access to trains, buses, light rail and the soon-to-be-completed Sydney Metro. It is part of a plan to boost the station's ability to cater for an expected 66 per cent increase in daily customer demand.


With major passenger projects either already under way or well into the planning stages in not only capital cities but also regional centres, light rail is booming in Australia and New Zealand. On the Gold Coast - the home of Australasia's most modern line - the Light Rail 2017 conference drew together hundreds of influencers and decision-makers to discuss current and future technology and trends. At the other end of the spectrum, freight rail continues to go from strength to strength, boosted not least of all by record grain harvests.

AusRAIL in Adelaide draws together many of the Australasian rail industry's leading influencers and decision-makers, with 536 delegates and 75 speakers taking part in the conference and 124 exhibitors (with 408) staff and 970 visitors filling the exhibition hall. Freight rail is under the microscope in Tasmania as a parliamentary inquiry examines TasRail's performance. On the infrastructure front, former deputy prime minister Anthony Albanese renews his call for the groundwork to be laid for a future high-speed rail service linking east-coast regional centres into a Brisbane-Melbourne passenger route, while in London the Bentley Systems Be Inspired Awards honour innovative projects around the world.

High-speed rail is back on the agenda in Australasia. Just days after the subject was discussed at the 2016 Financial Review National Infrastructure Summit in Sydney, a locally based consortium announced plans to create a Sydney-Melbourne HSR link drawing on value-capture from real estate development for funding. In the New South Wales state budget, rail freight emerged as a major winner. Signalling is set to be boosted through several key projects, not least of all in Queensland, where $500 million has been marked for investment. Rail linkages to ports are being also strengthened, and in August heavy-haul rail celebrated its annual conference at one of Australia's major coal-export gateways: Mackay in northern Queensland.

The Railway Technical Society of Australasia's biannual conference, CORE, is covered in detail in a special 18-page engineering-themed section. Rail projects are set to benefit at both federal and state level thanks to funding allocations announced in the 2016 national and Victorian government budgets. Australasian infrastructure planners can learn valuable lessons from London's Crossrail experience, its head of technical information says. In New South Wales, the route for the Newcastle tram line has been revealed.

Melbourne - home of the most extensive light-rail network in the world with tram tracks totalling 250km in length - was the setting for the Light Rail 2016 conference in February, during which delegates learned of the sector's latest developments both within Australasia and internationally. This issue's major focus on light rail covers cities as diverse as Manchester and Jerusalem as well as new and established installations in Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, the question of high-speed rail is examined in the light of newly released government papers, the CORE Melbourne conference is previewed and engineers explain KiwiRail's approach to constructing infrastructure in a country prone to seismic instability.

Employment diversity is on the agenda as rail looks to significantly boost the number of women working at all levels across the industry. A signal passed at danger, or SPAD, is the single biggest failure mode possible in railways and straddles the ﬁne line between accident and disaster, Anjum Naweed explains. Rail in Australia and New Zealand recognises and honours its most outstanding performers through the annual Australasian Rail Industry Awards.

Retiring Australasian Railway Association CEO Bryan Nye fired a parting shot at Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, describing his refusal to fund urban rail projects as “myopic”. The severe weather that swept across New South Wales in April created havoc for rail in the Hunter Valley, with dozens of coal trains literally stopped in their tracks. On the political front, not even Inland Rail – the Australian Government’s “poster” project – received any additional funding in a federal budget that proved disappointing for Australia’s rail industry.

In an increasing trend by companies moving towards controlling their own transport needs, specialist agribusiness trader Fletcher International Exports has started a container freight service between Dubbo and Port Botany in New South Wales – a distance of 480km. Downer Rail is ramping up its fleet management service deal with national freight operator Pacific National. Transport economist Matt McInnes sets out to debunk the myth that high-speed rail is not viable in Australia because of the country’s large size and low population.

Track + Signal  Cover - November 2019–January 2020 Edition

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Track + Signal  - November 2019–January 2020

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Track + Signal  Cover - May - July, 2019 Edition

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Track + Signal  Cover - July–September 2017 Edition

July–September 2017

Track + Signal  - July–September 2017

Track + Signal  Cover - April-June 2017 Edition

April-June 2017

Track + Signal  - April-June 2017

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Published quarterly, Track+Signal is the only magazine dedicated specifically to the business of rail transportation in Australasia. Its audience includes not only key corporate executives, engineers, politicians and other professionals within the rail industry but also serious amateur rail enthusiasts and those with a general interest in public transport infrastructure and technology and/or the rail heritage of Australia and New Zealand. Each issue carries articles on new equipment, track and station construction and staffing appointments, news briefs, case studies, company profiles, opinion and analysis essays, and tributes to historic rolling stock throughout Australasia and overseas. All content is aimed equally at experienced rail sector members and keen lay readers.

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Track + Signal - January - March 2016

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