He said building a high-speed rail link would cost the same amount as an airport.
So Australian, we need a second Sydney airport so we build a train set to Canberra instead... remember how long it took the NSW governments to build the City to Bondi commuter extension, it never got to Bondi Beach as once planned..
Eastern Suburbs railway line - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Eastern Suburbs Railway was a part of engineer
Dr John Bradfield's scheme for Sydney's railways (the
Bradfield Scheme). The alignment and profile for the line was set in
1926 and construction on the railway was started by the NSW Department of Railways. Construction commenced with the building of stub tunnels at
St James Railway Station. These tunnels ran southward from St James rising to clear the
City Circle lines and turned east towards the Eastern Suburbs
The Eastern Suburbs line was finally opened on 23 June 1979 by then New South Wales premier Neville Wran around 50 years after it was first planned and 31 years after construction began
A Bondi Beach railway
In 1999 a private proposal to extend the railway to
Bondi Beach at a cost of $197 million received backing from the Federal Government but the scheme did not go ahead. The project proposed to extend the Eastern Suburbs Railway from its current terminus at Bondi Junction to a new underground station at Bondi Beach. The Bondi Beach Railway Company, owned by
Lend Lease Infrastructure and the
Macquarie Bank, proposed to build and maintain the railway and to operate it for a 30-year term. The physical works involved the extension eastwards of the existing tunnels at Bondi Junction with the construction on a new 2.6 km single-track tunnel to the proposed Bondi Beach station site under South Bondi Park.
There was considerable opposition by local residents to the project, with concerns including the site chosen for the station, the impact on bus services and the proposed station use fare surcharge.
[4] When the Airport Link Company, the operator of the Airport line went into receivership due to low patronage in 2000, interest in constructing the Bondi Beach extension collapsed. The plan has now been abandoned.
rest my case...