‘Snail rail’: ACT chief challenges Albanese government to upgrade Canberra-Sydney train line

ACT chief minister, Andrew Barr, has challenged the federal government to upgrade the snail-like Canberra-Sydney train line, calling for cheaper upgrades as a "no brainer" even if a true high-speed line has to wait.

Noting that the federal government has earmarked the Newcastle-Sydney corridor as the first priority for its new High Speed Rail Authority, Barr even raised the prospect of developing part of a Canberra corridor at the same time.

Barr decried the current state of the line, on which services take more than four hours - speeds that have not progressed in decades and which are comfortably outpaced by cars, buses and planes.

Barr said a high-speed line between Canberra and Sydney would be ideal - he has already lobbied the transport minister, Catherine King, on it this year - but that even less ambitious upgrades would make a huge difference.

"I'll be a realist and a pragmatist on this and say, well, look, if the decision has been made for Newcastle-Sydney first, then Sydney-Canberra should be second. And it may even be possible to undertake some work on both simultaneously," Barr said.

"And if the feasibility work and all the rest on Newcastle-Sydney highlights a range of really tricky and insurmountable problems, then you could very quickly pivot to Sydney-Canberra and get a much quicker outcome."

But Barr was at pains to stress that even if Canberra-Sydney was overlooked for high-speed rail initially, the corridor did not need the fastest possible speeds to make the service competitive.

"I think at the three-hour point, it is seriously a gamechanger because the pricing is going to be much, much cheaper than flying, presumably," Barr said.

"The rail service between Canberra and Sydney at the moment is in the 19th century, I would like to bring it into the 20th century."

On Friday, the advocacy group Fastrack Australia launched its high-speed rail implementation proposal, written by a group of transport planning veterans, which calls on the Albanese government to progressively upgrade sections of the existing train corridor, starting with Sydney to Canberra, as the cheapest and quickest way to deliver fast rail by the end of the decade.

The proposal argues for committing to an inaugural section of track that is relatively straightforward to build, as opposed to the likely 50km tunnelling megaproject required for the Sydney to Newcastle corridor, as a way to bring on the fruits of faster rail sooner and prove its benefits for regional development and housing accessibility.

Instead of building a complete high-speed-only line from scratch, Fastrack's plan advocates gradually duplicating sections within the existing Sydney-Melbourne corridor used by passenger and freight services.

The first upgrades would be targeted at the most cumbersome and time-consuming steam-age stretches of alignment, many of which are between Sydney and Canberra. It suggests the Sydney-Canberra route could be cut to little more than two hours within a decade as a result.

Barr acknowledged that the ACT was not in a financial position to fund upgrades to the line, but said calculations from a few years ago estimated upgrades to cut the journey time to three hours would cost less than $1bn, based on costs at the time.

"I think that is a much more realistic and practical outcome rather than all this palaver around another bullet train corridor study," he said. "It's a no-brainer.

Barr has been frustrated by the slow speed of the NSW government-run train for years. In 2017, he invited journalists to Kingston station in Canberra as he boarded a service to Sydney to raise his concerns with the then NSW transport minister. Ironically, the train was delayed by an hour when it got stuck behind a freight service.

Despite numerous federal and NSW government initiatives in recent years that promised improved rail infrastructure, little has happened since.

New regional trains ordered by the NSW Coalition government to replace the decades-old Xplorer rolling stock have been repeatedly delayed, while current train carriages have tinting that blocks out mobile phone reception and the trains do not have wifi.

"The NSW government has not, it would appear, managed their procurement of their new fleet of regional trains particularly well given they were meant to be in service now," Barr said.

"Had the new trains been in operation and committed trackwork been completed, then some time would have been shaved off."