Belair Line

[SteelPan]

I'm wanting to learn more about Adelaide's electrification program - am checking out the likes of Infrastructure SA's site - anyone know any other interesting ones pls?? - Question, why not the Belair line for electrification?  Will it be done in the future?  Surely, a seemless system would be the long-term goal - I guess it's a stepped process.   :conf

Any info appreciated.  This will be a good reason to make a return to trip to Adelaide when it's up and running - been twice and enjoyed both trips very much.

Thanks in advance.

[Gazza]

I  think they are planning on just moving surplus diesel trains not needed after electrification to provide a more frequent service.

I think too the Government sees that the Belair line is a bit of a dud, and hence don't want to spend too much on it, since the gradient and turns means that it's a slow service, and the geography of the area limits the population that will actually use it. If you lived in Belair, it would be quicker to take a feeder bus to Torrens Park station rather than ride around that huge winding deviation on the train.

See http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2u4qFmfiMYkJ:transporttextbook.com/%3Fp%3D509+transport+textbook+belair+line&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com.au

Somebody, are you the same one that did posts on Transport Textbook....If so, can you put up your article entitiled "The lofty heights of efficiency"...TT is not working at the moment.

[Gazza]

Found both articles, but I had the Authors the wrong way around.

http://transporttextbook.com/?p=576

Reaching the lofty heights of efficiency: The Belair rail service
Sunday, April 12, 2009
By Riccardo

View Larger Map
Sorry if I'm sounding like a broken record on this, but thought it an interesting topic. Somebody has already posted an excellent post on this topic.

I've often suspected that the Adelaide to Belair rail service beyond Eden Hills or at best, Blackwood, is a triumph of politics and pretty scenery over good sense. In my other posts on this topic I compared the service with walking; an extreme case to be sure. Reality would suggest commuters would be looking at car or bus as alternatives, and many buses do in fact run into the Adelaide Hills. The rail service seems to be only an 'optional extra', a 'nice to have'.

This service used to run all the way to Bridgewater, deep in the hills and home of the mill and winery that is famous Australia wide. When OS Nock, the famous British rail writer toured this part of the world in 1969, he said that Bridgewater was a bustling suburban terminus. Even in 1987 when this photo posted in the earlier blog, credited to David Phillips, was taken, you can see what an important location it was. Not today. But nothing is forever, so we should not say that anything is immutable, even Belair.

I didn't want to debate the simple "Should the line beyond say Eden Hills be discontinued?" proposition as such, but to look at some of the deeper transport planning and operational issues. Sure, the line is uneconomic but so are most of the lines we are talking about.

Some of the principles I think this raises include:

    * the trade off of marginal time spent remaining on board the rail vehicle, versus interchange with a bus that will get there much quicker. (The same issue I saw beyond Waitekere in Auckland, where the beautiful line beyond slows a train down to 1.5 hours for a 50km transit)
    * What to do where the disadvantage the train suffers is in the vertical plane rather than the horizontal
    * Appropriate models of bus transit that connect with rail to cover the short distances involved.
    * How to determine the appropriate time comparator.
    * Network design.

The second point makes an interesting one and should be easily answered – a cable car, ropeway, escalator or similar can address this issue well. And we are not talking 'freak tech' either. It could be like Wellington or HK – a funicular, or series of escalators might well do the trick. I wouldn't know where to start even in costing the alternative – but I suppose the stream of income to pay for it would be the session of at least one railcar run beyond Eden Hills and attendent track maintenance (assuming ARTC didn't want the track for freight).

Which gets me quickly to the fourth point. The reason ARTC don't really need to consider a hills bypass is fairly plain. The time comparator is only the road freight competition on their main competitive traffic – intermodal freight, bound to/from Melbourne. A 12 hour plus journey, and if time savings were to be made, they could be found more cheaply elsewhere on the route. Even, dare we think, holding freight cruising speeds above 130km/h on the flat straight middle of the journey, across scubby plains, for hours on end, would save more time than finding a quicker way over from Murray Bridge to Adelaide. And the other traffics, sand from Loxton and wheat from the silos, are also not  time sensitive.

So, unless local politics intervenes, no reason to remove freights from the hills.

But the passenger market IS time sensitive, and while some are blase about the patience of Hills commuters (and have a rail bias in saying so) the reality is that they don't. They didn't in 1987, when the Bridgewater service ended, and are no better for it today.

Which gets me to the first point.

What is the convenience factor of staying aboard a slow rail vehicle versus changing onto a bus that will get to the destination quicker.

Let's assume, for convenience sake, the train has got to Torrens Park from Adelaide much quicker than any road vehicle could have, especially in peak times. The time penalty for the change is the turn-up-and-go frequency, split down the middle. The train is doing 15 minutes at best but a bus service taking seven minutes each way and not really stopping at each end (assume the driver takes a leak at a cubicle at each end, but immediately drives off when he's ready) would equalise the train and bus frequency pretty well. SO the result is not really turn-up-and-go; it is pulsed. But is only limited by the train's frequency.

Assuming we got a magic increase in train frequency to 7 minutes. Two buses could also maintain the turn-up-and-go arrangement by operating in a continuous circuit.

Let's look at the economics. Few simple things:

-bus driver with rigid licence is not going to require the driver to be paid as well as a train driver

-bus on public road is not going to cost as much as servicing a railcar and a long length of broad gauge track with no other current use

My final comment re the Belair service is the network shape, not the line speeds as such. While line speeds are ordinary, and reflect the curvature of the lines, they are not unremarkable by Adelaide standards. If we were worried about trains maintaining 50km per hour then most of the network would be considered problematic. It is the topology; the shape of the network at this point. The key competitive benefit of rail in Adelaide is the ability to get a clear run in a straight alignment from the city out to the suburbs without congestion.

From Goodwood down to Eden Hill, it has a straight southerly run. This is the part of the line with the upgrade potential. Potentially Blackwood could be regarded as an incremental "does no harm" extension and a major interchange with the area.

But the line beyond only returns to the same general area it came from, albeit a little higher above sea level. The limitation of conventional rail is visible at this point, no other consideration. Skitube gains in equivalent terrain at 1:8 and the funiculars gain even quicker.

So how do we judge the Eden Hills to Belair corridor? Unfortunately, it must be judged on its own merits. As an isolated section. We already know a bus connecting at Torrens Park would truncate the run substantially with, at most, a 3 minute interchange penalty.

Would you build a new railway to Belair? No, is the short answer, not with the traffic offering. Would you convert to Light Rail? As far as Eden Hills and Blackwood, I see no reason why not – it should be time competitive with road and attact ridership commensurate with current loadings plus additional loading for better service quality attracted by turn-up-and-go services and new vehicles.

Beyond Blackwood, I would only consider Light Rail a charity case. Maybe you could get the speed down somewhat by high acceleration LRVs and reduce the curvature by lower profile bodies. But these same highm performance trams might have just as much luck getting to Belair from Torrens Park by leaving the rail easement and heading up Old Belair road.

The road gains 200 metres in about 3 kilometes. Something near 1:12 gradient. This is not unheard of for trams, and the extra effort required by the vehicle to maintain a reasonable pace is more than offset by the much lower distance travelled.

Paradoxically, a trip to Glenalta could even be quicker by taking the rail service the WRONG WAY. In other words, the rail corridor, at least from Belair to Glenalta, might be a reasonable journey approached from the north rather than the south. We could end up with the Toodyay situation, the WA towns of Toodyay and Northam swapping positions on the journey from Perth after the late 1960s Avon Valley deviation was put in.

I suspect though, this flight of fancy is too lofty for us to give much further thought to. Suffice it to say, Belair at 3km from the Torrens Park Station is well within the range of a high frequency bus shuttle service, and would best serve commuters by being operated in this way.

For grieving rail fans, make your case to ARTC for a series of steam shuttles along the main on weekends – you'll end up with the same scenery, plenty of good photos and at the end of the day, the fun rail day out you really want, not a diesel powered Comeng railcar running all stations, which is all you get now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Economics, Featured, Planning and Operation, Politics and History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

http://transporttextbook.com/?p=509

The Adelaide Hills region has one railway line passing through it, being the main interstate standard gauge line to Melbourne, used by many daily freight trains as well as GSR's The Overland passenger train to Melbourne three times per week.

This area now has a population of around 60,000 people and there have been numerous proposals from various people to re-instate a regular local passenger service. Although this may sound good in theory, the line is far from suitable as a public transport corridor.

As far as Belair, TransAdelaide operates a suburban passenger service which provides an uneven 2tph service during the off-peak, and a train roughly every 20 minutes in peak and an hourly frequency on weekends an evenings. This line is only operated with single or two-carriage sets most of the time and serves a separate area to the main Adelaide Hills area as described.


Adelaide to Mount Barker routes. Green = rail, Red = road.

The large 'U' in the route of the line to get it uphill kills any chances of it being relatively direct for through traffic and as a suburban service it is still indirect, particularly beyond Blackwood where most alight. Sure Belair is a popular railfan spot and has a national park but neither generate much PT ridership.

Beyond the present terminus at Belair, Redhens and the odd Jumbo previously trundled up to Bridgewater every couple of hours until 1987 when the service was axed due to poor patronage. Any chance in re-instating the previous service was lost in 1995 but may be re-gained in the next few years when the suburban network is standardised.

Prior to 1995 the line consisted of two broad gauge tracks to Belair (shared by freight & passenger) with a single track continuing beyond there. During that project the line from Adelaide to Belair was split into two parallel lines, one BG line retained for suburban railcars and one line converted to SG forming the interstate line to Melbourne.

Three suburban stations at Millswood, Hawthorn and Clapham were closed to reduce running times, and crossing loops were installed along the line. More recently the weekday service frequency has been changed so that it is no longer clockface, outbound trains depart Adelaide at 36-24 minute intervals during the off-peak.

Running times vary from 31 minutes on weekends when only one train is in the single line, to in excess of 45 minutes for some counter-peak weekday runs. This line isn't proposed for electrification as a part of the rail revitalisation project, the best it's getting is concrete sleepers and refurbished 3000/3100 class railcars.

I won't cry over it's omission from electrification – like so much of the Adelaide network, the line is marginal and the need for heavy rail in particular is debatable. Riccardo has blogged before on the topic of making it light rail, and Want mayo with that about to do with attempts by Mitcham Council and others to get rid of those noisy freighters.

Proposals & my cold water

Occasionally the idea of running a passenger service to Adelaide Hills or the town beyond of Murray Bridge comes up, such as this article in Murray Bridge's local paper or this Railpage thread. Some would rather a meandering loss-making railcar to 1.5km of containers:

    Great idea: Murray Bridge councillor Jerry Wilson welcomes the idea of regional passenger rail in the Murraylands and the reduction of freight trains on the tracks.

Or the occasional comment like this from Family First:

    (b)the introduction of a passenger train service between Adelaide and Mount Barker via either the duplication of a broad gauge line from Belair to Mount Barker or conversion of the Belair metropolitan train line to standard gauge during scheduled re-sleepering works in such a way that the metropolitan line can reconnect with the standard gauge ARTC line from Mount Barker to restore rail coverage to Mount Barker, Littlehampton, Balhannah, Bridgewater, Aldgate and Stirling;

The idea might sound good from the outset – you have an existing railway line and a reasonable population. If there were a good, relatively direct mainline with spare paths then I'd suggest putting on some railcars and incorporating it into the suburban network.

But as my map above shows, this is a dog of a line from another era. I've done it myself and it was fun to ride but takes far too long to get anywhere. You can still do it on a passenger train if you book a ticket on GSR's Overland to Murray Bridge, taking almost two hours from Adelaide's Keswick Terminal, as opposed to about an hour's drive.

Closer to Adelaide, bus route 840F makes it to Mount Barker in 43 minutes, and the 864F reaches Bridgewater via Stirling/Aldgate in about 35, as compared to that little railcar that might be still climbing the hill to Belair before the bus reached Bridgewater, or might have just gotten there when the bus arrived in Mt Barker.

None of these bus services are particularly frequent. During the off-peak, the main route 864/864F which runs from the Adelaide CBD to Mount Barker via other towns on the way only comes every 30 minutes supplemented by the once-hourly express bus from Mount Barker although the peak service is relatively intensive.

Poor old Murray Bridge with it's 18,000 people located another 40km west of Mount Barker only gets four buses per day, not included in the Adelaide system with a $20 return fare.

Fix the buses and use trains elsewhere


Who would catch a winding old train when you've got this? (Photo from Ozroads)

The road route to the area, the South Eastern Freeway has been upgraded in recent years and is now of a high standard, providing for quick travel to the area. There is no congestion on the freeway itself but in peak hours there can be on Glen Osmond and the CBD. Bus lanes would be cheaper and provide a superior service to a train.

My view is that you should be grateful TransAdelaide's railcars are still making their way up around that horse-shoe to Belair and that any local passenger services beyond there are dead and buried. This is another case of only trains can or nostalgia getting in the way of transport planning.

The solution to public transport in this area is buses which provide much more bang-for-buck than a couple of railcars per day from Murray Bridge or Mount Barker, fighting with ARTC and 1.5km freight trains for paths ever would.

Tags: adelaide, freight, planning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Planning and Operation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

[somebody]

Different somebody.