Tim Shanasy, Byron Bay
Byron Shire’s fairytale ‘The Byron Line’ is the ‘Rail Trail’ everywhere else!
It became even clearer to me, after reading the notes from the recent Council meeting about ‘The Byron Line’, that this project is completely unrealistic.
We now have two shires, Richmond Valley and Tweed, ready to build a rail trail (with funding committed from state and federal governments) and the legislation is now almost through the NSW parliament to enable construction of this hugely usable Rail Trail asset.
Yet Byron Shire Council continues to blatantly risk the high likelihood of having nothing developed at all, and even having their part of the corridor sold off owing to lack of use.
The engineering company Arcadis has agreed to look at the bridges (digitally), at $33,000 per bridge, but they don’t seem to know how many bridges there are. This doesn’t include the $300,000 of Byron Shire ratepayers’ money already spent.
They have been unable to access all the bridges owing to extreme vegetation growth, and want Byron Council to clear it prior to inspection! NSW government has no budget to assist.
If Byron Council had consulted with the Northern Rivers Rail Trail (NRRT), they would have been able to access a lot of this information for free. The Arcadis report thinks there are only seven bridges between Byron and Mullumbimby, whereas there are actually 20 bridges. 20 x$33,000 = $660,000!
Council’s consultation and engagement has been with the ‘key stakeholders’ – TfNSW, both NSW and federal governments, Tweed and Richmond Valley Councils and community groups such as TOOT. Why was NRRT omitted from this group?
Ok, so we now know the state of the bridges and maybe how much it will cost to fix them, but who is going to fix them? Currently there are no funding opportunities for a Rail with Trail from the Federal or NSW governments, or any other funding sources.
Just suppose the bridges were fixed, then who is going to fund maintaining them?
Supposing the whole line was fixed, it would only be suitable for very light rail at speeds no greater than 60kms per hour! Just to be clear, this would not be public transport
You can ride an electric bike pretty quickly and it will take you to where you want to go.
Having heard about a recent meeting of the Bangalow Chamber of Commerce, it seems the Bangalow community are very unhappy that they are missing out on the rail trail. They have poor public transport and no safe place to cycle.
I don’t know about you, but I resent my rates being spent on a fairytale project that will never come to fruition.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
