Thursday, 6 February 2025

 Matthew GUY (Bulleen) (17:21): (995) My matter is for the Minister for Public and Active Transport, and I ask the minister to review Victoria’s heat rail speed restrictions in summer for V/Line trains. By way of background, for Victorian trains and New South Wales country trains, when temperatures reach 37 or 38 degrees, maximum speeds are reduced across the network to 80 kilometres an hour in New South Wales and around 90 kilometres an hour in Victoria. This is a practice that has been in place since an incident on the broad-gauge section of the Albion rail link in, I think, about 2007, where tracks had buckled due to extreme heat. There is a famous YouTube video of a train coming around a corner and slamming on its brakes and not stopping in time. It did not derail, but it went over quite a severe kink in the rails. Since then Victoria and New South Wales in particular have adopted heat speed restrictions.

Those tracks were a shandy of concrete sleepers and timber sleepers. Timber sleepers were what predominated on every rail network, particularly in Australia, for the best part of 100 years, until we then moved to what Europe had done since the 1950s, and that was we used concrete sleepers across the network on all major lines. Yet heat speed restrictions still apply in Victoria, which is interesting because the Nullarbor Plain, which you would think is hotter than Victoria, has never had heat speed restrictions, nor has the Northern Territory, nor has Western Australia and nor has regional Queensland. Regional Queensland has trains which operate as fast as Victoria’s, at 160 kilometres an hour. On the Nullarbor Plain the Trans-Australian Railway line has diesel-haul passenger trains that operate at 115 k’s an hour, the same as Victoria. They have never had speed restrictions, and common sense will tell you that the Nullarbor is hotter and stays hotter than most of regional Victoria and, yes, even northern Victoria for prolonged periods of time.

It beggars belief that despite having better quality track, better rolling stock and lesser heat periods than, say, Central Australia, Victoria maintains heat restrictions which slow our VLocity trains from 160 on most lines and 130 in the north-east down to around 90 k’s an hour, which has massive impacts on regional commuters and massive impacts for timetables. Mind you, we do not slow the urban trains down, which still do 115 k’s an hour, but we do slow the V/Line trains down. It beggars belief. It is interesting to note that this still applies, and while it has been in place for some years, and I repeat is also still in place in New South Wales, I believe it now needs to be reviewed, given that the implementation of the heat speed restrictions was put in place because there was a predominance of timber sleepers or a shandy of timber sleepers at that stage. That is not the case on the network now, particularly on the faster lines where 160-k-an-hour speed limits apply on the intercity network.