COSTLY SERVICE: "It seems, for example, that every passenger on the Westlander between Brisbane and Charleville (pictured) rides along with a $2236 subsidy". Picture: Steve Pohlner Source: The Courier-Mail
THERE'S just something about passenger trains, if only because they represent about the last generation of technology I understand.
That's reasonable, given that some of Queensland's "name" trains are about as old as I am.
However, they are increasingly expensive, as shown by figures published by The Courier-Mail this week.
It seems, for example, that every passenger on the Westlander between Brisbane and Charleville rides along with a $2236 subsidy.
QR's other major rural passenger rail journey, between Townsville and Mount Isa, is bankrolled to the tune of $2038 for every bum on a seat.
The figures were so staggering that online opinionators smelt an accountancy rat or detected the heavy hand of bureaucratic incompetence.
It is difficult for the innumerate to know just where the cost calculations begin and where they end.
And, frustratingly, there was no comparative figure for the real cost of subsidising road and air transport.
If there is not some kind of complacency at large in QR, it does seem to err wildly on the side of caution when it does its sums.
For example, a couple of years ago Rod Polain brainstormed the idea of holding a music festival at the Dulacca showground serviced by return charter trains from Toowoomba and Roma.
QR chewed it over and came up with the idea of a temporary platform, presumably because it couldn't accept the responsibility of passengers clambering down to the ground.
The logistics were summarised as: security fencing $2500; temporary platform $8000; safety barriers $3500; lighting towers $1500; yard slashing and clearing and construction of hardstand areas $10,000; contingencies $2500.
That all added up to $28,000 (plus security for railway property and trains).
Oh, and trains?
One locomotive and four carriages carrying 200 people from Toowoomba would cost $62,018 with $1952 per extra carriage.
A railcar from Roma seating 108 customers would cost $44,668 and one with 160 customers $52,341.
Leaving the $28,000 platform out of it, that works out between $310 a person from Toowoomba (about 250km away) and an amazing $413 from Roma (about 100km).
Coach company Murrays quoted an infinitely more realistic $7500 for three 66-seat buses running twice the distance - from Brisbane or the Gold Coast - which works out at a tad under $38 a head.
A music festival at Dulacca might not have been the showbiz idea of the century but you can only conclude that either QR really isn't interested in the charter business or its passenger services are so expensive to run, they should go the way of the steam engine. And it should put paid to the fond idea that the railways are necessarily of any great comfort to country folk.
It all gives substance to the figures published this week.
The problem, we are told, was apparent to Anna Bligh's Labor government but nothing was done.
Now the baby is in the lap of Campbell Newman's Government and all the portents are that it is plucking up the will to do something.
However, it's easy to see why Bligh's mob wilted and it would be equally easy to understand if Newman's team eventually wimped out.
The political ramifications are daunting, with some people even harking back to the days of 1960s and '70s treasurer Gordon Chalk and his alleged vandalism of country rail.
Labor would have been painfully aware of the damage suffered by the government of Wayne Goss when it tried to rationalise rural services in the 1990s.
And even Newman has to tread carefully around the sensitivities of the "N" component of his LNP Government lest some go rogue.
Railways have a special place in our national psyche, even if we are reluctant to consign them to memory, where they might well belong. That special place is confirmed by the completion of the line from Darwin to Adelaide, decades after it ceased to be a real national priority.
For country Queenslanders, the hardware of the railway represents a tangible connection with the world, even if they are about the last people who would use it.
If services were terminated - or even reduced - they would see it as further evidence of the bush being abandoned by the city and betrayed by an LNP government.
Conversely, if nothing is done, some city folk might see it as the National tail wagging the Liberal Party dog, despite the fact that touring urban dwellers make up a large percentage of passengers.
Rationalisation might be a good theory but the political pain is real.
However, it is a debate we must have to get the best value for money rather than a slow ride into the past.
sweetwords@ozemail.com.au
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