Hawkesbury River rail bridge – WikiPedia photo.
Opinion – Greg Cameron
Work can start immediately to design and build outer Western Sydney’s dedicated freight rail line between Glenfield, Eastern Creek and Newcastle.
‘SydneyFreightWest’ is a proposal to privately fund and operate a container terminal at Newcastle; a dedicated freight rail line to Eastern Creek; and an intermodal terminal at Eastern Creek with a connection to Glenfield and the main rail line south. Taxpayers will be saved the $4 billion it would cost to build a dedicated freight rail line between Strathfield and the Hawkesbury River. SydneyFreightWest can be completed and operating before 2028, when the Sydney metropolitan rail system will reach capacity for freight train movements.
Last year, four heavyweight reports by the NSW government recommended identification and preservation of the Outer Western Sydney Orbital Road/Rail Corridor: NSW State Infrastructure Strategy, NSW Long Term Transport Masterplan, Draft NSW Freight and Ports Strategy, and Joint Study on Aviation Capacity in the Sydney Region. An earlier report, the 2007 Pearlman Review of the F3 to M7 Corridor Selection, found that “there are strategic reasons why an additional corridor to the north will be justifiable at least in some time in the future. These reasons arise from the vulnerability of the F3 to closure because of accident, bushfire and the single Hawkesbury River crossing.”
With SydneyFreightWest, it will be faster to rail containers between Newcastle and Eastern Creek than it will be to ship containers past Newcastle to Port Botany and move them by rail to Eastern Creek. The cost difference in rail transportation is trivial – it is the difference between a 400km round trip from Newcastle and a 120km round trip from Port Botany. The NSW government must build the proposed Western Freight Line, between Chullora and Eastern Creek, if containers are to be railed between Port Botany and Eastern Creek. The alternative is to truck containers. A better use for the western line corridor is for passenger rail.
An economic impact study will demonstrate that the benefits of the Newcastle/orbital option will significantly outweigh those of the Port Botany option. These include: reducing the growth in commuter trips by road by removing freight from the Sydney and Newcastle metropolitan rail systems and increasing passenger services; planning economic growth in western Sydney with reference to a long-term freight strategy, centred on Eastern Creek; progressively relocating warehouses, port-related industry and container handling facilities from expensive real estate in eastern Sydney to western Sydney, where superior facilities and logistics can be built and attractive capital gains realised; lowering the cost of freight for all of northern NSW; and providing a viable alternative to road freight transport in NSW (75% of interstate freight entering NSW has Sydney as its destination).
Construction of an intermodal terminal at Eastern Creek must start immediately to meet expected growth in container movements. By 2050, it is estimated that container movements will be 13 million TEU, compared with 2 million TEU movements in 2012. The proposed Moorebank intermodal terminal, with its 1.2 million TEU capacity, is undersized and will reach capacity before 2020.
Leasing Newcastle’s container terminal site would replace the NSW government’s current plan for leasing Port Botany container terminal. The Port Botany container terminal site can be used for more productive purposes, such as expanding passenger services for Sydney Airport, reducing airport traffic congestion, improving air cargo handling facilities and extending the second parallel runway to accept larger aircraft that carry more passengers.
Candidates for the September federal election can declare if they support or oppose the SydneyFreightWest proposal. However, if the dedicated freight rail line is to be built between Strathfield and the Hawkesbury River, Labor and the Coalition are obliged to respond to the NSW government’s request for the funds.
