Regional Rail Revival Seminar

A lot has gone on in the past few months and little has been reported.

The Regional Rail Revival Seminar at Blayney organised by LRTC in conjunction with Charles Sturt University was held at Blayney Community Centre on Friday 10th May. More information about the seminar including downloadable reports and videos of the presentations are available from the CSU website.

The next ordinary meeting of the LRTC will be held at Grenfell on the 15th June 2013. The actual venue and start time will be displayed on this site soon.

The members of the LRTC are deserving of an apology as the program for Blayney was altered without their knowledge. The earlier date shown for Blayney seminar was for May 18 and this info, was not sent out to all members. The fault is entirely in the executive who became so involved in the organisation of the seminar that the home duties were not attended to by whoever you wish to blame.

Also due to actual constrictions imposed upon the Seminar Committee by the large number of attendees (there were 105 Registrations) it became apparent the the formal meeting of the LRTC had to be absorbed into the seminar where members heard information that would not normally be made available to the group due to the wide spread of experience of the speakers gathered in the one room.

Mayor of Blayney Shire Council ,Clr. Scott Ferguson, gave a warm welcome to the visitors to Blayney.

Associate Professor Ian Gray was the spearhead of the Charles Sturt University group. We are deeply indebted for his service to transport in our region.

Mayor of Cowra Shire ,Clr. Bill West gave an update on the progress of the five Councils work ongoing with the re-opening of the Blayney to Demondrille lines. The MOU will soon be back in the hands of the Government and then the hard work starts on developing the EOI to attract potential operators of the line.

Ed.Zomber, Director Rail Services, Saskatchewan,Canada, has opened many lines in Canada and had a good story to tell which mirrored the process which the groups are going through in Australia in trying to get line operating once again.

After the short break, I announced the MOU from Wollongong City Council which is now fully signed up by all the neighbouring Councils in the Wollongong area of influence. This is concerned with the building of the railway line from Maldon to Domabarton which will open up freight access to Wollongong .

Dom Figliomeni, CEO of Port Kembla Port Corporation outlined the work that has been already done to Port Kembla and the massive work planned to expand services for shipping.

Bryan Nye, CEO Australasian Railway Society who is based in Canberra gave the next talk and opened up on how charges are worked out for shippers and operators on a railway line.

Next speaker was Frank Lander,Senior Policy Officer, Department of Transport in Victoria spoke on his personal experiences in taking on the problem of closed lines and opening the lines to work in a cost effective manner.

The Seminar closed at 12.30 and the persons who wanted to discuss the mechanics of opening a line and put forward proposal went into a separate meeting room to further discuss the situation.

Both sections of the seminar came back together to have a debrief and after a long day the proceeding were officially closed by the Mayor of Blayney, Clr. Scott Ferguson at 3pm.

It would be expected that Charles Sturt University will come back with a report and possible future directions.

The seminar dealt with the Blayney to Demondrille and the Maldon to Dombarton line and was designed to concentrate attention and efforts in a narrow field to ensure that we do make progress.

This was our aim and in my opinion is was achieved.