Issue 55: March/April 1990

Elsewhere in this issue we have examined in detail the emergence of very fast rail and its implications for air transport right around the world. Australia of course a prime target for the new era of rail as our own VeryFastTrain (VFl) consortium is on finals in its multi year $19m feasibility study as to whether to proceed with the VFT project linking Sydney and Melbourne. There seems to be every likelihood that the $5bn project will proceed and once operational later this decade it will probably then head north to also link Sydney with Brisbane.

VFT surveys that canvassed the opinions of 30,000 travellers and an additional 2,000 households through 1987/88 indicated that fast rail would take more than half of the anticipated air transport market between Sydney and Melbourne. This data has to be taken seriously as this route has always been referred to in airline circles as the ‘jugular’ of the entire Australian domestic system. More than a third of all RPKs are logged on this one sector and a loss of trade of that magnitude is something that no airline executive could hope to ignore.

Out of Canberra, air transport will all but disappear as it will be significantly quicker, cheaper and easier to travel to Sydney on the VFT than by jet. Even between Sydney and Melbourne the time deficit will be only around 40 minutes compared with an ever slowing air transport system. In that vein, it is interesting to note that it was usually quicker to fly between the two capitals by Electra propjet thirty years ago than it is today in a jet. What the Electra did not have on those days was the built in ‘headwinds’ of airport and airways congestion that nowadays has your typical Boeing or Airbus either backing off to preserve an arrival slot or tracking towards its usual beacon for an indefinite hold. Business travellers from Canberra to Sydney for instance probably know the landscape around the Bindook beacon as well as their own backyards! It is indeed a rare flight that takes you to Sydney without it’s seemingly inevitable hold over Warragamba Dam. In the future, while this is happening, alternative travellers will be railing it to the centre of Sydney (and also KSA, for onward departures) at 350kph in just under one hour and at less cost and in greater comfort.

Can aviation compete with that?

If overseas experience accounts for anything then it can’t on journeys that by air take less than two hours from boarding to disembarkation. The most recent example of this is France’s TGV which travels at around 270kph between Paris and Lyon. When the TGV entered service in 1981 it immediately took 80% of Air lnter’s traffic base. Whilst perhaps Air Inter is not the best example of an airline that in comfort terms would endear travellers to it when a viable competitor exists, it still clearly shows the effects that fast rail will have on aviation in the future. The TGV is now being opened up with new routes to Bordeaux, Nice and Marseilles- all routes that will cut heavily into Air center’s traffic base. In recent years Air Inter has fought back and has consequently improved its market position though the train is still beating it hands down and will compete even more effectively when the new TGV terminal opens in the heart of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport in 1991.

A world away, in Japan is the famous Shinkansen or ‘Bullet Train’. These transport over 400,000 people daily via a fleet of 450 Shinkansen that travel at around 240kph or about 100kph slower than our own proposed VFT. Their existence since the mid sixties has virtually made domestic jet travel between Japan’s major cities irrelevant by comparison with North America and much of present day Europe where very fast rail does not exist.

What very fast rail offers the traveller is a cheaper fare, an easier journey, more space for baggage (an important consideration when connecting from an international flight to a domestic service or vice versa), greater comfort as seating standards are superior than in a plane and greater schedule reliability with the bonus that you are delivered to your downtown destination rather than to an often remote airport.

How many travellers also have a real fear of flying. It is perhaps not everybody’s idea of fun being strapped into a metal tube that you have no control of at 200 knots on approach at night through a storm into an airport you can’t even see. As this doesn’t occur on the train, then that is a potential market that could ultimately seduce many people from aviation.

If this all sounds like we are bagging aviation then it isn’t. What we are saying, loud and clear, is that for the first time ever short haul aviation linking major city pairs now has a practical, cost effective and highly innovative competitor, if not today then certainly in the years ahead.

The task of the airlines will now be not to put their heads in the sand and hope that it will all go away but to address their major foe, namely the dual problems of worsening airport and airways congestion. To ensure that flights that are advertised aren’t routinely cancelled and that discount fares really are available and are not merely brochure try-ons to lure you towards a full fare economy ticket as they have often traditionally been.

While our own VFT, if it should proceed, won’t really be operational till at least 1997, it is also worth remembering that there might be up to five jet airlines operating domestically in Australia by that time. If half of their Sydney/Melbourne traffic vanishes then the effect on all of them will be profound to say the least. Perhaps they should take an each way bet, as TNT obviously has, and join in where possible to ensure that. they actually can use the VFT to feed their longer haul flights. That is what is now occurring overseas with airlines like Lufthansa having actually operated its own trains (in full LH livery) for years now to feed their Frankfurt and Dusseldorf hubs.

As very fast rail begins to transform the way we travel in the final years of the twentieth century, it will be for the airlines to look to ways to work with rail while improving their own operations to the point where they can remain competitive with this new and exciting rival.