Western Australia’s grain freight debate has become oddly unhinged.
We talk endlessly about road damage, truck numbers, safety, emissions and who should pay. Rail tragics insist that reopening Tier 3 lines will solve all our problems. Road realists respond that we should simply widen and upgrade roads to allow triples.
Yet the one thing farmers and road users actually need to have a rational debate about is largely absent: a clear, public, apples-to-apples understanding of what it really costs to upgrade rail versus building bigger, wider roads.
When it comes to rail, we are driving blind.
There is no shortage of analysis supporting road investment. Detailed business cases, benefit-cost ratios, pavement life models and safety studies are produced as a matter of course by Main Roads – though many remain conveniently out of public view.
By contrast, when rail enters the conversation – particularly Tier 3 branch lines – the State has largely washed its hands of the network since privatisation. It now appears to have only a limited understanding of what it would actually cost to upgrade Tier 1, 2 and 3 lines.
Worse, the details of the Brookfield lease and maintenance schedules remain locked away behind the shield of “commercial-in-confidence”.
Neither approach helps the public understand the true cost-benefit of rail versus road.
That is not good enough for farmers, who fund grain freight infrastructure through CBH levies, taxes and access charges, nor for regional road users who are asked to absorb heavier trucks on networks never designed for them.
As the State government reviews the future of the Brookfield rail lease, there is an obvious and overdue step to take.
Government should publish a comprehensive study that consolidates existing state, national and international evidence on the cost of rail construction, renewal and upgrade.
At the same time, it should open the books on the real cost of upgrading the various parts of our 5,000km rail network along with the 5,000km of key grain freight roads.
Until this happens, the debate will remain driven by gut feel, slogans and selective numbers rather than evidence.
A central problem is that the term “rail cost” is used to describe fundamentally different scopes of work.
At one end is mechanised track renewal on an existing formation – replacing sleepers and rail, refreshing ballast, tamping and regulating.
At the other is a full rail project bundling land acquisition, bridges, culverts, drainage rebuilds, level-crossing upgrades, signalling, communications, approvals and contingency.
Both are labelled ‘rail’, but their costs are worlds apart.
When these scopes are not separated, the numbers become meaningless.
What the evidence actually shows is far less dramatic than the public debate suggests.
First, track itself is not the expensive part.
Australian valuations of heavy rail infrastructure consistently place the unit cost of track replacement – materials and installation – well below $1 million per kilometre in many contexts.
Second, recommissioning closed Tier 3 lines would cost more, but not ‘metro money’ more. Where formations have deteriorated, drainage has failed, or level crossings require modernisation, costs rise.
Publicly cited estimates for restoring Wheatbelt lines typically sit in the low single-digit millions per kilometre – often around $1-2 million depending on condition and scope.
That is real money about $1-1.4 billion across the network – but it is a fraction of the more than $14b spent on Metronet.
Third, genuinely new greenfield rail is a different category altogether.
The Melbourne-Brisbane Inland Rail project is costing about $20m per kilometre.
But no one is calling for a new railway between Narrogin and Pinjarra.
What we do desperately need are targeted upgrades on existing corridors – Northam to Kwinana and Northam to Albany – where the bill is again likely to be a fraction of what has already been spent in Perth.
If we want a serious debate about road versus rail as we head towards moving 30 million tonnes of grain each year, we need facts and numbers – not media releases from ministers and the opposition.
We also need to be honest about what really drives rail costs, and the implications of leaving a critical freight network in private hands while it is progressively sweated towards the end of its asset life.
This is not a rail advocacy debate. It is a system-efficiency question.
Every tonne moved off rail is a tonne left to go to port by road. Local governments inherit maintenance burdens they cannot sustain. Safety risks rise as truck numbers and axle loads increase.
These are real externalities, yet they are rarely costed against the alternative.
Without transparent rail costings, we cannot properly compare upgrading a marginal rail line with rebuilding regional roads every few years to carry triples.
The State government’s review of the Brookfield lease is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset this discussion.
Government already holds decades of engineering studies, corridor assessments and asset data. National and international benchmarks are readily available.
What is missing is disclosure.
A published, peer-reviewed study should be the minimum expectation of the community before this debate goes any further.
It should clearly state assumptions, separate track from civil works and systems, and present scenarios with confidence ranges – not slogans. Only then can government, CBH, farmers, freight users and taxpayers judge whether buying back the lease is worth it, and what is genuinely required to meet Western Australia’s long-term freight task.
