Comments on: 1960s Muscle Car–Inspired Train Could Be a Beautiful High-Speed Train in Australia

By: Mr T

Mr T — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 03:05:00 +0000

This is just fantasy, our politicians are too busy point scoring and pissing away money on desal plants and proping up unsustainable car companies to ever get anything like this done. The current link between Sydney and Melbourne is woefully slow, with sections of track where the speed is limited to 40km/h due to damage from floods that happened several years back and have still not been fixed.

The only way this could ever happen here is if it was purely private enterprise funded and there were no politicians involved…

By: CosIcan

CosIcan — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:56:00 +0000

It’s hardly a “long trip”. It’s only two hours. That’d be fine.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 23:35:00 +0000

The seats on US trains give you a ton more room than in airplanes, and i imagine the 1st class sections trump 1st class sections on planes, too — but didn’t really look.

By: Gorgeous, crazy-fast Australian train would go over 500 miles in two hours | Grist

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:16:14 +0000

[…] are kind of excited about the fact that the Aussies have designed a train that would take people from Sydney to Melbourne (roughly the same distance apart as Boston and […]

By: gnarum.tecnologia

gnarum.tecnologia — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:46:00 +0000

This is a very cool train!

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 06:02:00 +0000

lot of good points, as always.

the design pics are always several times nicer than the end product. not just in Oz.

By: tsport100

tsport100 — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 05:32:00 +0000

Would’ve been a better investment for the future than pi**ing the mining tax windfall up against the wall with AOFM sub-prime funding to prop up funding supply and FHB funding to prop up demand. All we have ended up with is grossly unaffordable house prices instead of a modern update to ageing infrastructure.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 05:13:00 +0000

France’s HSR certainly gives you more room than first class airplane.

I find nothing in the above design appealing. Those benches along the sides would be terrible for a long trip.

Unless they provide sheets and blankets….

By: Thomas Cheney

Thomas Cheney — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 05:07:00 +0000

I doubt any economy class having such low seating density. I would expect nothing more than something like first class airplane seats.

By: Ronald Brak

Ronald Brak — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:42:00 +0000

Sounds good, but Sydney’s impressive ability to not put a new rail line in after badly needing one for decades makes me wonder if it will go ahead. (Real estate prices in Sydney are among the most expensive in the world.) Also, photos like the one at the top of this article are always lies in Australia. We’ll be lucky if they take into account the actual size of Australian bottoms when designing the seats, let alone mostly transport empty space between Melbourne and Sydney.