This is the seventh in a series of essays by journalist Bradley Perrett on long-term planning ideas to provide for a better future for the people of Greater Newcastle and the Hunter Region.
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It was a bit incongruous. The earthquake issue of the Newcastle Herald in 1989 carried a mass of gripping reporting about the previous day's disaster - and also the usual selection of letters to the editor.
Written before catastrophe had overtaken the city, the letters discussed issues that interested absolutely no one on that day.The writer of one of those unread letters, a young public-transport enthusiast, was up in arms about a state government plan to cripple Newcastle's suburban rail system.
Sad to say, the Herald had been hoodwinked by the then Liberal-National government into reporting that beneficial rail reform was planned. As the letter pointed out, what the government actually wanted to do was close about half of the system.
I wrote that letter. I knew that Greater Newcastle did not use its trains much, but I was certain that its impressive collection of about 30 stations had to be preserved for a more populous future when the city could not rely so much on cars.
What I didn't imagine was how far away that future was.
Almost a third of a century later, the trains are still only lightly used for suburban travel.In fact, less than 4 per cent of trips in Greater Newcastle are rides on any kind of public transport.
The population has grown but more people can afford cars.Newcastle is a motoring city and has hardly any interest in changing - nor, for the moment, any reason to change.
As earlier articles in this series have argued, we should in fact urge the state government to help keep us that way for as long as possible by reviving old reservations for more arterial roads.
But serious dependence on public transport must come eventually. As discussed in last week's Hunter Essay, we should imagine Greater Newcastle expanding from about 600,000 people now to at least 1 million by the year 2100.
The state government ultimately chose not to close stations in the early 1990s (not because of my nasty letter, I assume) and its public-transport focus now looks at least strong enough for us to keep those that we have.
On the two lines that terminate at Newcastle Interchange, four of the five Lower Hunter local government areas have 31 stations, not all considered part of the suburban service. One of the lines splits into two at Maitland.
We should bequeath reservations for more lines to later generations, especially by the simple method of reviving alignments of long-abandoned coal railways. These are a remarkable resource for a city as it faces its future.
Some of those revived lines might be used for trams instead of trains, and maybe we'll have tram-trains, which can run on streets as well as dedicated rail corridors.
Anyway, we should not be satisfied with the four suburban tramlines that are currently proposed.
An obvious choice for a future mass-transit line is the railway from Maitland to the Cessnock district, which handled coal trains until last year.
This trunk line of the South Maitland Railways also provided Cessnock with a passenger service until 1972. It passes between Weston and Kurri Kurri, so it can serve both of those localities, and it's near a lot of land that the state expects to release for more housing.
Adjustments to the route would probably be needed; the time to design them is now.
Our successors would also value the long-abandoned coal line that ran from the main line at Cockle Creek to Barnsley, Holmesville and West Wallsend. Much housing is planned for those areas, too, so we should protect the old alignment.
Moreover, the Hunter Environment Lobby has worked out a plan to extend this line to the Cessnock line at Kurri Kurri, forming what would eventually be seen as the outer-urban loop. This could be built soon if, as the group persuasively suggests, the route were chosen for the proposed Lower Hunter Freight Corridor, a Newcastle bypass for freight trains.
The Fernleigh Track was originally a coal line that also carried passengers to Belmont. Older readers will remember the quirky rail motors that ran on it, the Tin Hares.
We might regard the Fernleigh Track as a train or tram reservation that currently has an interim use. Alternatively, there may be space to lay rails alongside it.The revived line would connect to the current main line at Adamstown and, depending on the number of stops, serve Kotara, Highfields, Kahibah, Whitebridge, Redhead, Jewells and Belmont, all of which can be expected to be denser in the future.
Admittedly, land is available for a motorway along much the same route, as earlier Hunter Essays have discussed. If the road were built, the mass-transit line would seem less useful.
Since the rail route is safely preserved as the Fernleigh Track, our task is to consider how later generations could extend it to Blacksmiths and, if tunnelling is cheap enough, even to Swansea and Caves Beach.This concept needs to be planned early.
The alternative is to leave future generations struggling with the political mess of unexpected housing resumptions and demolitions - or, worse, an inability to build a piece of infrastructure they'd dearly like to have.
Some old coal corridors should never have been abandoned. The most disgraceful mistake was to allow construction on much of the line from Civic to The Junction, a precious transit route in the densest part of the city.
From the harbour it crossed what is now Civic Park then ran behind houses in Cooks Hill. Since density at Merewether is likely to be very high in the distant future, and since getting better roads into that suburb would be hard, our successors will curse us for not leaving that dedicated corridor for trams.
We can revive it as a reservation at least as far south as Centennial Park and plan a route along streets to The Junction.
As for extension into Merewether, we again have the valuable heritage of former coal routes. Because four lines met at The Junction (hence its name), Merewether has a remarkable arrangement of streets that radiate from that locality, ideal for diverging tramlines. Two of those streets should be chosen as future tram routes, connecting at their far ends to form a loop.
Since the streets are already there, reviving the routes requires only reconnecting them to the Cooks Hill line by eventually resuming a little land at The Junction that has been built on.
In two ways, this Newcastle-on-rails concept is old fashioned. It assumes that a large and dense city many decades from now will still want railways, whereas new technology could offer a better alternative, such as autonomous cars combined with cheap road tunnelling.
Nonetheless, prudence demands planning for the technology we have.
Second, because all these lines took coal to the harbour, they all ultimately connect to Newcastle's city centre, which has lost its former importance. But they would also serve major centres along the way, notably Maitland and Glendale, where Lake Macquarie City Council will surely succeed eventually in getting a station built.