A dedicated freight rail link to the Port of Brisbane was listed as essential by Infrastructure Australia in 2016 and, as we reported in our article Port of Brisbane Gets Rail Funding four years ago, the Federal Government gifted Queensland $20 million to finalise a business case for the project.
The Courier Mail newspaper ran an article last week under the heading, “Trucks to ‘swamp’ city roads as govts dither,” by Hayden Johnson. In it, they quote Port of Brisbane CEO Neil Stephens as saying the lack of a dedicated rail connection meant roads would be “swamped by trucks.”
In our article posted in November 2019 we wrote:
“Without a Port Connection, the freight this region relies on will continue to be moved almost entirely by truck, increasing congestion, emissions and road safety risks well into the future. The project, which will separate the existing shared passenger and freight rail networks, would provide a dedicated link from the Inland Rail project to the Port of Brisbane. By doing so, Brisbane could achieve a globally competitive rail modal share and remove 2.4 million truck movements from the local road network at the same time.”
The Courier Mail reports that, four years after pocketing the cash, the state government has spent just $4.4 million and is “yet to make significant progress into the project.” The link is meant to be the completion of the Inland Rail project which is a 1,700-kilometre rail line connecting Melbourne to Brisbane for the purpose of transporting freight. (See our post earlier this year: Inland Rail Freight Link Report). The previous government had intended to terminate this Inland Rail at Acacia Ridge, before an outcry forced it to look at adding a link right through to the Port of Brisbane.
In February 2021 we posted a piece titled The Case for a Port Rail Tunnel Link. It revealed that “a group of business people called the Committee for Brisbane has called for a dedicated rail link to connect the Port of Brisbane with the inland rail mega-project, saying it would create a $5.4bn boost to the economy and create 1200 jobs annually, as well as take 2.4 million trucks a year off the road.”
The newspaper reports a further quote from Neil Stephens: “With the region set to experience nation-leading population growth in the decades ahead, we must move now to build a freight network that keeps costs for consumers low and protects the liveability of our local communities.”
As we pointed out four years ago, Queensland’s growing population and the subsequent freight task, climbing from 1.35 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent shipping container) in 2018 to around 5 million in 2050, necessitates an urgent shift from the region’s reliance on road freight. Currently only 2% of containerised freight comes to the Port of Brisbane via rail. The rest arrives on trucks. In 2018, that equated to four million trucks movements. With the current rail constraints in place, that number would increase to over 13 million by 2050.
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