Unfortunately we don’t have a rail freight network that either works well or reaches every township in Australia, and until we do encouraging the switch from ICE road haulage to EV road haulage is the best way to reduce transport industry emissions.
For a lot of the more rural towns (or a least for the ones I know of) that do have rail connections, they are only accessible using diesel locomotives as there is no electricity network set up to power electric trains. So if we don’t want to introduce more emissions from rail freight we would have to electrify the whole rail network.
Realistically we should be building rail and allowing EV trucks to be more accessible, but Australia is a big place, building all that rail infrastructure will take time. A good stepping stone would be to build rail connections to regional urban centres and then have trucks distributing it to the surrounding towns, but even building that much rail will take time. And that’s just the construction. The amount of time it would take to secure the land corridors for the rail would be considerable alone. AEMO have been having a difficult enough time securing land rights to build transmissions networks across properties
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
This is a very common “fuck cars” solution but it’s not clear exactly what is envisaged.
Rail is currently used only for single commodities. In west aus for example grain is hauled from farms to bins in trucks, then bins to ports by rail. Obviously you can’t send trains to every paddock in every farm.
For mixed freight, a grocer 500km from Perth can order whatever at 5pm and have it arrive by trucj at 12pm, ready for it to be shelved ready for sale the next morning.
High speed freight rail just isn’t viable for WA given the low population density. Even if it were, I wonder at whether mixed freight in such short time frames is possible.
fruitleatherpostcard@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Yes I agree that a mixed method is best. However the current predominant method of road is unsustainable and dangerous. For instance, there is no excuse for an expanded east coast line not doing more to service various hubs which trucks can then the ‘final mile’ (yes I know; many 10’s of Ks) delivery.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Yeah, I’m not trying to advocate for trucks but in the example I mentioned mixed freight just wouldn’t be competitive.
By truck, the journey of Warehouse > 500km > Shop can be achieved in 7 hours.
By train, warehouse to train would be 2 hours minimum, 500km would be 8 hours minimum, and train to shop would be 3 or four hours minimum. Basically there’s two additional unload & sort & load events in the train journey, and the train is slower. The ~12 hours outlined here is also the absolute best case - most places in West Aus just don’t have the requisite economy of scale.
I guess there must be solutions which just aren’t apparent because this method of freight isn’t common. Shipping containers would be helpful for example.