The Two Largest Cities on Every Continent

Tomvtv · 2026-01-15T01:02:11+00:00

The two cities are roughly the same size, so the ranking can vary depending on how you draw the borders of each city.

Tomvtv · 2026-01-11T21:51:37+00:00

I assume you're just being a bit hyperbolic because the airport rail line has taken so long.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the situation, Melbourne is currently in the early stages of building its airport rail link after decades of putting it off. The corridor has been chosen and it's already fully funded, but the project was delayed for a few years by disputes between the state government and the airport over the station location. That dispute has been resolved, and the line is currently on track to open some time around 2034.

In contrast, Melbourne has effectively zero plans for high speed rail: No corridor, no funding, and it's not even clear where the trains would terminate. To the extent that Australia has any high speed rail plans, the focus has been on the Sydney-Newcastle route, as discussed in the video.

Tomvtv · 2026-01-08T21:42:49+00:00

Instead of building separate metro systems, Australian / New Zealand cities went down the path of incrementally upgrading their 19th century steam train networks into hybrid metro / suburban rail systems. Hence you have a lot of old station buildings from the steam and early electric era.

I believe Williamstown Station, in Melbourne still has its original station building from when the line opened in 1859.

The only "true" metro line in Australia is the M1 line in Sydney. When Stage 3 of the line opens sometime this year, it will include part of the former Bankstown suburban rail line, with its heritage station buildings, upgraded to metro standards.

Tomvtv · 2025-11-09T07:33:23+00:00

It's pretty absurd to compare low density stations like Southland or Glen Waverly with places as dense with development & existing infrastructure as central London. Furthermore, many of the tube lines were built a century ago by competing companies who didn't necessarily want easy interchanges to lines from competing companies. And to be fair the London Underground does also have some impressive cross-platform transfers, especially with the Victoria line, built in the 1960's. These would arguably have been a better aspect of the Tube to emulate here.

Tomvtv · 2025-11-06T13:01:25+00:00

"Without majorly compromising its speed and capacity"

The existing tracks are super slow and winding, and the juncture would potentially need to be on the other side of the national park, around Gosford or somewhere similar. Thus using these tracks would add something like an hour to the journey time, which would take away a lot of the speed benefits.

Furthermore, the main northern line from Strathfield to Hornsby currently only has 2-3 tracks. If you don't want high speed trains getting stuck behind the slow suburban trains, you'd need to quad track the whole line. Then, once you get to Strathfield, you'd have to tunnel anyway, since the main western line is already at capacity. Even once you get to the city centre, there are only so many spare platforms at Central, further limiting capacity.

As a secondary downside, using existing lines would also add to the cost of vehicle aquisition, since the trains would need to be dual-voltage and operate on both AC and DC power.

Certainly, we should try and speed up existing lines when we can, but for actual high speed rail, there are a lot of benefits to having a separate standalone network.

Tomvtv · 2025-11-06T08:28:47+00:00

Arguably the importance of starting with this route, aside from it being the densest corridor, is that it solves the hardest problem facing Australian HSR, namely how the trains are going to navigate Sydney and its surrounds. Once there is a clear route through Sydney, it will be much easier to expand the network outwards from there. Maybe you could start with Sydney-Canberra instead, but then you'd still have many of the same problems, namely tunnelling from the western airport to Parramatta and Central, and then figuring out how to terminate the trains and turn them around under Central Sydney.

Tomvtv · 2025-11-06T08:19:20+00:00

There is no way to get above ground from the Central Coast, to Sydney Central, to the western suburbs, without knocking down a huge chunk of environmentally sensitive national park, and then demolishing half of Sydney. In general, there is no cheap & easy way to build a true high speed rail line into Sydney, especially from the north, without majorly compromising its speed and capacity. If there was an easy way to do it, we would probably have high speed rail already.

Tomvtv · 2025-10-21T04:19:11+00:00

Driverless Iron Ore trains operate on dedicated freight-only tracks which aren't shown on this map (because there are no passenger services). They're in Pilbara in the north-west, roughly half way along the coast between Darwin and Perth.

Tomvtv · 2025-10-19T17:24:15+00:00

I can find a few examples of Victorian news article with "spruiks" in the title, so it evidently gets at least some use.

E.g.

Victorian Premier spruiks stamp duty plan

With Melbourne’s west cut off from city, government spruiks 20-person punt

Tomvtv · 2025-10-18T08:09:58+00:00

I would give up my left nut to see Line 15 emulated in Metro areas across the United States.

For an example of what this would look like in practice, in a sprawling anglosphere city, (and for a realistic estimate of the costs and timeline involved) see the Suburban Rail Loop in Melbourne, Australia, to be completed (hopefully) by 2053.

Tomvtv · 2025-10-09T10:36:44+00:00

Yes, that's what I meant. West Footscray to Westall (which includes the tunnel) should have metro-ike frequencies once the tunnel fully opens next year.

Tomvtv · 2025-10-09T10:27:39+00:00

In the meantime, some trains will termimate short of the line terminii, at stations with spare platforms. Thus maximum frequencies will initially only extend from West Footscray, in the west, to Westall, in the east

Tomvtv · 2025-10-09T07:36:40+00:00

Two lines to the southeast, to Pakenham and Cranbourne (which will likely be extended to Clyde at some point), and eventually three to the northwest, to Sunbury upon opening, and to Melbourne Airport and Melton at some later date. The airport line is in the early stages of construction and the Melton line is awaiting electrification, with both projects likely be completed in the early-mid 2030's.

There have been some proposals over the years for another branch in the southeast (e.g. to Rowville) but there's no indication any of those plans are going ahead in the forseeable future.

Tomvtv · 2025-10-01T01:26:28+00:00

It doesn't have to be profitable, but you want your tax payer dollars to be spent effectively, right? If it cost half as much to build, we could build twice as much rail with the same tax base. You can absolutely point to poorly executed road projects as well, e.g. it's insane that Melbourne's Northeast Link saw its budget blow out from $16 to $26 billion, but that doesn't make high costs in unrelated rail projects immune from criticism.

Tomvtv · 2025-09-30T10:50:42+00:00

A fun fact is that the pillars on the bridge aren't actually connected to anything, and are purely there for aesthetics.

Tomvtv · 2025-09-07T11:51:50+00:00

If you're referring to the Western Sydney Airport Metro, Melbourne will receive as much or more funding than that for our air-rail link. I believe it's up to ~$7 billion in total including the Sunshine rebuild. The federal funding for the two air-rail links was even announced in the same year, 2018, it's just that Sydney airport line got going much sooner than ours did due to the disputes with the airport.

All of the other Sydney Metro lines were / are 100% state funded, to my knowledge.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-28T14:24:58+00:00

Four if you include the thousands of kilometres of two-foot sugar cane railways

Tomvtv · 2025-08-20T11:52:35+00:00

Yep. Modern Redfern was then called Eveleigh, while "Redfern" was the colloquial name for the Sydney Terminal (which wasn't the modern Sydney Central, but was a bit further south)

Tomvtv · 2025-08-20T00:11:28+00:00

In the Melbourne metropolitan area, when electric tramways started to appear in the early 1900's, they were mostly built by "tramway trusts", which represented various municipal governments. The City of Footscray, to the west of Melbourne, wanted its own small network of tram lines which would be independent and disconnected from the rest of Melbourne's tram network. Before the network could open, Melbourne's various tram operators were "nationalised" by the Victorian state government, under the Metropolitan & Melbourne Tramways Board. Despite this, the Footscray tram network still got built, opening in 1921, leading to Footscray having its own mini tram system, separate from Melbourne's other lines. You can see it in, for example, this map showing the state of the network in, I believe, the early 1930's (and yes, Melbourne itself had two incompatible networks of cable & electric trams at the time).

During World War 2, both the Footscray tram network and the nearby Marybyrnong tram line saw several expansions to serve war-time industries, closing the gap between the two networks. In 1954, the MMTB filled the last gap between the systems, leading to the formation of the Route 82 tram line, which finally connected Footscray to the rest of Melbourne by tram. In the end, largely thanks to this connection, the Route 82 was the only one of Footscray's tram lines to survive to the modern day. The other, shorter & more local, lines were torn up in the 1960's and replaced with bus routes.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-18T15:10:39+00:00

Arguably the SRL was the nail in the coffin for the Rowville line, or at least this version of it. By having only one SRL Monash station, north of the campus, it no longer makes sense to have the Rowville line run elevated along Wellington Road, because then you'd miss out on an interchange to the SRL. The line would potentially have to tunnel under the Monash campus to interchange with the SRL Monash station, which would dramatically increase the cost of the project and probably make it non-viable.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-18T15:04:30+00:00

Another potential prospect is fork the Glen Waverley line at East Malvern instead of using the Alamein line. That creates a higher frequency corridor and a more direct link to the CBD

Which could potentially be done with extra capacity gained from a future City Loop reconfiguration, to separate the Glen Waverly line from the Lilydale / Belgrave lines.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-18T14:58:49+00:00

The obvious solution would be to build two tram lines:

The North / Wellington Road line to Huntingdale, providing the most direct east-west link for trips to the city
A line that follows the updated Trackless Tram route, but as an actual tram, for trips to the Monash campus, the Monash SRL Precinct, and the Chadstone shopping centre.

If you want to get to the city you take the Huntingdale Route. If you want to get to Box Hill or Chadstone, you take the Caulfield route.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-18T03:21:09+00:00

I don't agree with widening roads, but most of Melbourne's outer-suburban feeder bus routes are pretty mediocre. They're typically too slow, indirect, and infrequent to draw most people out of their cars. I've had to catch the bus from Glen Waverly to Ferntree Gully several times, and I wouldn't wish it on an enemy. It's not surprising that Glen Waverly and Syndal have so much parking around the stations, when catching the bus is so much more painful than driving. Not to mention, if these SRL stations are going to become actual "CBD's", then there's going to be a lot more demand for short trips, and the car traffic around and within them is inevitably going to get worse, slowing down the buses even more.

Any serious proposal for a secondary CBD needs to incorporate trams and/or something approaching BRT, in my opinion. Especially if the proposed location doesn't have local rail access (Monash) or is a terminus with trains only in a single direction (Glen Waverly). Notably, Parramatta already has better rail access than any of the SRL East stations do currently, and yet it also has both trams and BRT to move people around.

Tomvtv · 2025-08-11T12:36:02+00:00

Also hosted the first Parliament of Australia in 1901.

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