Passenger rail still on agenda
Areturn drive from Horsham to Melbourne for retired Wimmera farming businesswoman Kola Kennedy, 80, has prompted her to join a push for greater domestic passenger-rail services in the region.
Mrs Kennedy said despite being highly independent and an experienced motorist, the trip to Bentleigh on the other side of Melbourne for a medical appointment was ‘long, arduous and required full focus’.
She said she had regularly driven to Melbourne to see her specialist but would prefer to be able to do the trips from Horsham via the convenience, timeliness and comfort of a reliable passenger-rail service.
“I’m not into travelling in the confines of a bus and all the changeovers required – I consider that archaic in a modern Victoria and Australia – and the Overland rail service simply doesn’t have regular enough or necessary flexible scheduling,” she said.
“When it comes to driving, as I’ve told learner drivers I have mentored, when you drive you must concentrate from the moment you open the doors to until you pull up and stop,” she said.
“You must be on the ball and that’s alright when the job involves concentrating for an hour and you can stop, get out and walk around. But that doesn’t suit everyone, especially on the freeway or if you need to make an appointment on time. You have to be totally committed to concentrate – otherwise you don’t get there and become a statistic.”
Mrs Kennedy said she felt like public-transport provision west of Ararat
to the South Australian border had gone backwards.
“We must have rail services that provide five-days-a-week connectivity and it should be from Melbourne to the border. If Premier Daniel Andrews doesn’t know what rural and regional means then someone should send him a dictionary and a map,” she said.
“There is so much traffic on the roads – heavy B-double transports sharing motorways with everyday cars, and at speed. We can’t treat our highways like Europe’s autobahns. They simply aren’t built for congested high-speed traffic.”
Mrs Kennedy said India still used rail services installed 100 years ago.
“Many are antiquated yes, but at least it is a service they are providing,” she said.
“To the other extreme, Japan has technologically advanced bullet trains travelling in excess of 300 kilometres – and they lost the war.
“Governments over time, in their lack of wisdom, have taken our services away. You only have look at an old map at Ballarat station of the rail services that were previously operating in Victoria to understand how far backwards we have gone – failing our rural communities in the process.”
Constant use
Mrs Kennedy said she was confident that if the Wimmera-mallee had a safe, reliable and easily accessible domestic rail service, it would be in constant use.
“We read about all the attempts to generate development opportunities from education to industry and so on, yet the one fundamental service missing in the equation is decent public rail transport,” she said.
“Why would people want to come to Horsham or other parts of the Wimmera when there is no appropriate public transport? I think it’s absolutely ridiculous when having all these dreams to develop our part of Victoria that we don’t have a necessary and modern passenger-rail service.
“This issue has been the subject of so much community advocacy for so many years but for no result. There must be a way circumstances are made to change.
“I’m sure these views run parallel to a multitude of Wimmera-mallee residents. It is time any government in power realised that Wimmera-mallee people are important.”