The Swedish X2000 tilt train spent two months in NSW and cut the journey time between Canberra and Sydney by an hour. Photo: SJ.
In 2017, MP Andrew Leigh dropped a bombshell: Canberra had had enough of the slow train to Sydney. His pitch: trial a tilt train provided for free by Spanish company Talgo.
Dr Leigh said Talgo believed its trains operating on existing tracks could cut the route from 4.5 to 2.5 hours.
It might have sounded like hype, but it had actually been tested before.
Thirty years ago, Canberra trialled the Swedish X2000 tilt train for two months – and it reduced travel times by an hour.
So what happened and why is the Canberra to Sydney tilt train plan still a mystery?
Tilt trains started their journey in Europe during the high-speed rail boom of the 1970s.
But for large mountainous countries such as Sweden, the issue with high-speed rail then was the same as today – it was expensive.
It needed specialised tracks, elevated, angled, and electrified to accommodate custom-built locomotives.
Many nations already had huge amounts of existing rail infrastructure. The problem with running a fast train on this wasn’t the speed; it was the corners.
The tilt mechanism lets a train go around a bend at an angle – like a motorcyclist rounding a corner – allowing it to go faster without special tracks.
Anyone who has ridden the Canberra to Sydney train knows it barely cracks walking speed through Molonglo Gorge. Photo: NSW David Folgin.
The technology was a hit for countries that wanted faster rail without the hassle of specialised infrastructure, including Sweden, which began designing its own in 1969.
In 1990, Sweden’s state railway Statens Järnvägar introduced the X2000, its first high-speed train, at a fraction of the cost of comparable high-speed rail systems.
The success of the train caught the attention of then NSW Premier John Fahey, who paid $8 million to bring out three carriages for a 10-month trial with CountryLink NSW.
On 23 April 1995 at 6:45 am, an X2000 driver trailer, a bistro, and a First Class car left Sydney Central Station and arrived in Canberra three-and-a-half hours later, an hour faster than the normal train of the day.
The trial ran for seven weeks. After Canberra, the trains ran a 95,000 km tour of NSW from Byron Bay to Broken Hill.
The X2000 cost $49.80 for first class, $74.70 for premium. It advertised passengers could use laptops, send faxes, and even make mobile telephone calls on board. Photo: David Folgin.
It seemed like a total success: 10 – 25 per cent travel time reduction, no infrastructure upgrades, and a rollout of just four to five years.
The estimated cost for a total replacement of NSW’s CountryLink fleet: $250 million (about $500 million today).
But a fleet of X2000 was not to be.
Three years after the trial, the NSW Standing Committee on Public Works recommended against buying the trains.
The reason: state rail lines were in too poor a condition to take full advantage of them, but the report offered a silver lining.
“Fast train options, therefore, should be discounted until rail infrastructure has been upgraded to a standard where optimal travel times can be achieved,” committee chairman Paul Crittenden stated at the time.
Upgrading NSW tracks wasn’t going to be cheap, but it wasn’t impossible.
The estimate for achieving a 2.5-hour journey between Canberra to Sydney with tilt trains, $500 million.
But NSW was already locked in a battle with the federal government over rail infrastructure funding.
“The responsibility for achieving the goal of better track quality is largely in the hands of the Commonwealth Government,” Mr Crittenden stated in the report.
NSW wanted rail to be treated like interstate highways and receive Commonwealth funds. But the Howard federal government had a different idea.
In 1998, it unveiled a $3.4 billion plan for Speed Rail, a dedicated high-speed train between Sydney and Canberra that would cut journey times to 75 minutes.
The proposal scuppered any last hopes for the tilt train and NSW opted to instead refurbish its existing fleet.
Speed Rail was abandoned in 2002 and the Canberra to Sydney line is slower today than it was in 1995.
The idea of the tilt train drifted out of public consciousness until 2017, when MP for Fenner Dr Leigh took up the torch.
He said he had met with representatives of Talgo, one of the world’s pre-eminent train manufacturers, which would bring a state-of-the-art tilt train to Canberra for free to prove it could work.
“We’d all love a high-speed rail line, which would upgrade the track and reduce the journey time to an hour or so. But if that isn’t feasible, then we shouldn’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good,” Dr Leigh said in 2017.
He called it a unique and valuable opportunity for the then Liberal government. He said if successful, the service could be rolled out in a few years.
Three years later, Labor won federal government. And in 2023, like every government since 1984, it announced another high-speed rail project.
What happened to the Talgo tilt train offer is a mystery.
Region contacted Dr Leigh, but he declined to comment.
Talgo was also contacted for comment. It did not respond.
Transport NSW, the Department of Infrastructure, and Infrastructure Australia were also contacted. They did not have records of any proposals.
Meanwhile, the X2000 continues to operate in Sweden between Stockholm, Gothenburg and Copenhagen.
