Rail Trail Business Case February 2024

Armidale Regional Council States:

"The economic viability of returning passenger and freight services to this section of track, and beyond to Tenterfield has been examined and was shown to be unfeasible. Recent estimates for returning a train service to the Qld Border vary widely from capital cost of $300M to $2.0B. Even with quite optimistic assumptions about passenger numbers and freight tonnages, AEC (2018) estimated returning a train service produced a benefit-cost ratio of just 0.5, indicating that discounted costs outweighed the discounted benefits by two to one." Executive Summary.

How did the council find that returning train services to Tentefield was found to be unfeasible? Was it the AEC study 2018? if so, it was only a desk top study of 6 pages, now highly discredited.

What was the analysis undertaken to arrive at a cost benefit ratio of 0.5%? Who did the analuysis? Where can we get full details?

Who costed the cost of returning a train to be $300m to 2 billion and where can we access the full cost analysis and author?

Northern Regional Railway Company(NRRC) in collaboration with New England Railway Inc(NERi) engaged transport inspectors to study the line in 2024 and released a summary report. It states that the cost depends on the intended use, AXL load, and speed required. The summary report gives the costws under 4 scenarios. Lowest is around $500,000 per km. Highest is aound 1 million per km. Even if we use the highest cost, to upgade the line from Armidale to Wallangara(210 kms) will cost about 210 million. 

Cost of upgrading is no where near the figures cited by people who have not studied the condition of rail line first hand. 

https://www.nrrc.com.au/post/stage-1-armidale-to-wallangarra-railway-reopening-costs-released