Australia's OVERLAND train

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I am not familiar with Australian railway routes, but hope to some day ride the coast to coast "Indian Pacific", if it is still running...don't even know if it uses the same route or part of the 'Overland' route.... :unsure:
 
I have rather the feeling that GSR has been mishandling their trains in many respects (a bit too much emphasis on the high-dollar tourist market, for example), but the real issue here is that the train was running something like twice a week for the last few years.  I get the point the minister made about lousy ridership, but a twice-a-week train isn't going to be useful to most people, so it isn't a shock the numbers were lousy.

Edit: The subsidy was around A$1.3m...so somewhere vaguely around $1m/yr US.  I can't speak to the revenue side of things, but it does seem like the train was somehow managing pretty decent cost recovery for the lousy ridership levels and lack of pax utility involved.
 
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As far as I can tell it is purely a subsidized tourist operation. It should realistically be funded out of the Tourism budget rather than the Transportation budget.

In some sense the same is true for the Indian Pacific and the Ghan. Many of the Queensland Gold Coast trains actually provide more of a true transportation service than some of these other trains. The Sydney - Brisbane service also appeared to be a bit more transportation oriented the last time I rode it many years back. Don;t know what is its status now.
 
The Spirit of Queensland is pretty good on the transport front. QR makes a soup sandwich of their timetables but they're at least trying.

The Ghan and Indian Pacific have mostly given up the pretense of being transport oriented...I think the Ghan threw in the towel with the "Ghan Expedition" operation.

Really, the problem is GSR...they jyst do tourist trains. Oh, for Mr. Ellis's mindset...
 
This is the typical consequence of electing a right-wing government in South Australia.  Right-wing government == cuts to train service.  The Victoria government is left-wing, so they maintained the service (though sadly did not improve it).

The critical issue is Ararat to Belair, a 300 mile distance, since there is state-maintained state-run commuter rail from Belair to Adelaide and Ararat to Melbourne.  Large portions of the route from Ararat to Belair are extremely straight; it could probably be improved to be much, much faster without much relocation of track.  Nobody's been willing to do it yet.  It calls for some vision.
 
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