As one of the many thousands of locals who have been involved in the long campaign for accessible, socially, environmentally, and cost effective local public transport, especially train services, since the 1980s, and who used the one daily train service regularly for over thirty years, as did thousands of others, it’s incomprehensible that any informed person could be calling for more empty, inaccessible, expensive slow buses to replace trains that are able to travel between towns safely in a fraction of the time it takes buses.
Trains must be the spine of a successful integrated public transport system.
Most people know trains are the most efficient and cost effective way to transport people and goods. Eight train carriages can carry as many people as fifteen buses.
We’re told that local tourism generates $8b per year. We know stamp duty from the sale of expensive real estate also generates billions for state government coffers. So when will we see some of that money spent on the infrastructure and services needed for locals and over two million tourists?
In 2004 the MP for Richmond, Justine Elliot, acknowledged the community’s hard work campaigning for trains and promised $150m of federal funding for train services, providing Labor won the election. Labor won the seat on the back of that promise and won government in 2007. But not another word has been spoken about the need for train services, though the need is greater than ever!
From 2003 to 2011 the LNP state opposition, and now MP for Tweed Geoff Provest, campaigned aggressively on returning train services saying a commuter train service on the line would ‘cost less that the coaches’ that replaced the train. But when the LNP won the 2011 election they spent $2m of taxpayers’ money on a dodgy study that claimed it would cost $1b to repair the 132km of line. The $660,000 per kilometre repair of the Byron section of line for a train has shown this claim to be dishonest.
If our politicians were actually doing their job and listening to the community and 30,000 north coast people who have done the research and signed petitions to state parliament for train services, let alone doing some actual research themselves, they would know the slow, empty coaches that replaced the train service in 2004, are not only unreliable, they take twice as long to travel between towns as the train did. They are not accessible for anyone with a mobility problem. These empty coaches have cost taxpayers at least $100m since 2004.
Despite Australians being held hostage by psycho tyrants waring and killing people while destroying access to fuel to run cars, businesses and for farmers to plant and harvest crops, our politicians and mayor are happy to spend millions/billions of our money on more roads to fill our towns with more gas guzzlers, while at the same time spending $2.933m per kilometre, or $44m of taxpayers’ money, destroying fifteen kilometres of the multi-billion-dollar train line between Crabbes Creek and Mullum. $44 million (!!!!) to destroy a multi-billion-dollar train line for a bike track which is not providing public transport let alone economic benefits in the Tweed. A bike track that can be built beside the train line. What an eyewatering waste of taxpayers’ money and disgraceful treatment of so many locals who have been calling for much more cost effective train services.
There’s never been any community consultation about this issue and people are unaware of the outrageous cost of this bike track. They’ll be outraged when they find out.
Then our council has the audacity to increase rates and charge for parking!
Just up the road we’re all paying billions in federal funding to rebuild the Gold Coast train line which was destroyed in the 1960s, plus the light rail line down the coast. Gold Coast residents can travel to Brisbane for 50c! That’s the transport our low-paid local workers, students, seniors and people with a disability are entitled to.
We know repairing the line in Byron for a train cost a fraction ($660,000 per kilometre) of the $24m one kilometre Byron by-pass which runs along the train line and next to the train station!
Despite the promises made by politicians’ to get the trains running, we were told by one politician that ‘your clever campaign (for train services) was in fact too clever. It snuffed out the last hope that there was of saving the line!’ Sounds like they’re happy to spend as much taxpayers’ money as possible to punish a whole community for daring to be outraged at the way politicians treat them!
Is this what we pay politicians millions for?
People who care about the environment and community, the eyewatering waste of taxpayers’ money, and want decent affordable train services on our valuable line again, and the 22ks of train line built to connect to the Queensland rail system at Coolangatta to enable locals and millions of visitors to travel in a more sustainable way, need to write submissions to the state government’s ‘Draft North Coast Strategy Regional Integrated Transport Plan’ before the 14 June. (see The Echo 6 May page 10) www.haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/sritp/north-coast
It’s time to stop allowing politicians to waste millions/billions of taxpayers’ money for little community benefit.
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. 
