A native of the sunshine state capital, I decided to do the unthinkable: take public transport to the beach.
You can’t catch a train to the beach from the centre of Brisbane, one of the great transport planning failures of Australia’s third-largest urban conurbation.
It’s a wasted opportunity so obvious in 2016 – when a longstanding rail proposal has become a key political issue for the city in this federal election – but it beggars belief that people could do so in the 19th century.
I set out from the heart of the city at the Queen Street mall from where, if I had a car and a lucky day with traffic, I could be pulling up at Main beach, Surfers Paradise, 77km away, in less than an hour. But without a car?
“That’s a hard one,” says a TV journalist on a day off. “I always drive.”
A local working in a tourist gift store, who’s never made the trek to the Gold Coast except by car, tells me: “I think you need to get a train then a bus. The train is a fair way inland.”
Going to the sunshine coast, that other site of world-class beaches to Brisbane’s north, is “even harder”, he warns.
A bartender from Britain, six weeks into her Brisbane stay, says she hasn’t travelled to the beach yet: “Everyone tells me I need a car.”
From the mall, I walk 11 minutes to central station. Queensland Rail staff tell me I should catch a train to Nerang and get the 740 bus to Surfers Paradise. The buses are regular, “every half hour”, I’m told.
So are the express trains to the Gold Coast, which leaves me with a 17-minute wait. I buy a coffee that I’m going to have to finish quick – lest I risk a $235 fine for drinking it on the train – and ask the barista how she gets to the beach.
She doesn’t have a car so she does the train/bus thing: “It’s worth it. Sitting that long on the train is the only shit thing.”
It wasn’t always this way. From 1889 there were trains from Brisbane to Southport, which brought day-trippers on a single ride from the capital to within walking distance of Gold Coast rollers. From 1903 there was another line to Tweed Heads just over the border in New South Wales.
But by 1964, under the Frank Nicklin government when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was works minister, both lines had been torn up in favour of the mighty motor car.
“It was the great tragedy of transport in Queensland,” says Robert Dow of transport lobby group Rail Back on Track. Dow, a retired medical scientist, likes to point out the health benefits of getting around by trains and buses, which invariably involve “an active transport component” – aka walking.
But those heavy rail corridors through prime Gold Coast real estate are gone forever, an act that no government can realistically afford to undo – although there have been various proposals over the years.
In October the Turnbull government announced it was on board with $95m for the second stage of the Gold Coast light rail, which will link the beach strip for the first time to the heavy rail line from Brisbane. The Abbott government had refused months earlier.
The second stage will allow passengers to swap a train for a tram at Helensvale, about 15km west of Main beach, and get to the beach from there.
Design is under way and construction is due for completion before the Gold Coast hosts the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
But the chances of a single train ride again from Brisbane to the beach have been dashed for all time.
At 11.30am, I jump on the Gold Coast “express” to Nerang.
The journey takes me through seven south-east Queensland seats: Brisbane (LNP), Griffith (ALP), Moreton (ALP), Rankin (ALP), Forde (LNP), Fadden (LNP) and Moncrieff (LNP).
The “express” won’t get past 80km/h until we’re past Beenleigh, in Forde. Meanwhile, I can scoot down the highway in my car at 110km/h most of the way. What gives?
Aside from the conditions of the actual tracks, the speed and frequency of trains running on the south-east network is a factor of a single river crossing in the centre of Brisbane, a chokepoint whose effects fan out beyond the city’s boundaries.
The cross river rail, a longstanding proposal for a second CBD river crossing brought anew by the state Labor government, was ranked in February by Infrastructure Australia as Queensland’s highest-priority initiative, and eighth in the national pecking order of infrastructure plans.
This month it was overtaken on the list by two road projects, including a highway upgrade on the southern Gold Coast. They had their business case completed –something the Palaszczuk government hasn’t yet got around to with the cross river rail but aims to do so next month.
The $5.2bn rail tunnel under the river, which would link Bowen Hills to Dutton Park – and giving us all a quicker ride to the beach – needs commonwealth dollars for it to to materialise.
A Griffith University political analyst, Paul Williams, says cross river rail is “back front and centre on Queenslanders’ electoral radar”.
“If you’ll excuse the pun, Brisbane is at a crossroads in terms of infrastructure,” he says.
“Unusually, inner-city issues – alternative transport to cars on roads, rail and light rail – will have some sort of profile in this election. How much Canberra is willing to pay for [cross river rail] will be front and centre.”
The federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, has backed funding the proposal.
Others, such as the LNP hopeful for the seat of Brisbane, Trevor Evans, say it is “great idea” that needs fleshing out.
“At the moment there’s no business case,” Evans says. “We don’t actually know where the tunnel’s going to go, so it’s at a pretty preliminary stage.
“Once we’ve got more detail, I think you’ll find everyone in politics thinks it’s a great idea, but as always these things come down to cost-benefit and where it sits in terms of the immediate priorities.
“So as more information comes out I’ll assess that. I’m sure I’ll be happy to support it.
“But anybody who’s hoping it is ... an immediate solution is probably misleading people into thinking that it’s something that might come into play in the next term or two because it’s probably a long-term project.”
Not that the federal government needed a completed business case to commit funding for the Gold Coast light rail, which in February was ranked well below cross river rail at 38th on the Infrastructure Australia priority list.
But there are firm expectations that Malcolm Turnbull will actually come through with a funding announcement on cross river rail before the election on 2 July.
Dow says his transport lobby group is so confident this will happen “we’ve basically stopped worrying about cross river rail in a general sense”.
None of which makes my trip to the beach any faster.
An hour goes by and I’m still on the train, but we’re past Beenleigh and finally getting a head of steam up – 140km/h! And then we come to a dead halt in the middle of some bushland south of Ormeau. This may or may not be because the track from Coomera to Helensvale is still being duplicated. The rail line to the Gold Coast was reopened in 1996 as a single track to Helensvale (extended to its southern terminus at Varsity Lakes in 2009), which meant duplicating it now comes at extra cost.
I arrive at Nerang station at 12.47pm. The station master tells me the quickest way to the beach is a $30 taxi ride. Luckily there’s a bus to Surfers at 12.50. No food or drinks allowed on the bus, though, and having left Queen Street mall at 11am, I’m starting to get hungry. After getting stuck in roadworks at Benowa, the bus weaves its way through Chevron Island and I can see the towers of Surfers. After a 25-minute bus trip, I’m deposited outside a mini-golf park whose main attractions include a “Vomatron” ride.
The entire trip has cost me about $10.
Dow later tells me that the optimal way to get to the beach is to get a train to Helensvale, a bus to Gold Coast university hospital, then the light rail to a station right next to the mini-golf park. I take this way back and – despite the undeniably smooth ride on the “G” (the light rail) – the whole journey takes me two hours and 19 minutes.
But on arrival by bus at Surfers, I walk seven minutes to Main beach and my feet hit the sand at 1.21pm.
I write “2 hours, 21 minutes” in the sand – the duration of my beach outing from the centre of the sunshine state capital – and ask a local passerby, Jody Tessarolo, to take a photo.
She asks what the numbers mean.
“That’s pretty good going,” she says.
I could have flown to Sydney quicker.
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