A new city built between Albury and Wagga, as part of the bold new rail plan, would be located on farm land likely in the Henty area.
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Consolidated Land and Rail Australia co-chairman Nick Cleary said the phantom township would be connected by its own ultra-quick rail link to each of the centres.
“Our plan is to build eight new, smart, sustainable, green field cities which will be connected by the high-speed train,” he said.
“Those cities would be in relative close proximity to existing towns and centres to enable access to existing healthcare, education and transport systems.
“The city we want to build between Albury and Wagga would service as a tri-city region to make sure we get a wonderful network of the three cities that helps the economic viability, the sustainability and productivity of those three centres.”
Mr Cleary insisted taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay a cent, as the venture would fund itself by utilising a finance scheme that would capture land price increases.
“That value uplift would pay for the civil and rail infrastructure going forward.
“We’ve secured land, that’s under our legal control and subject to milestones moving forward, with government, that’s to build our cities on.
“In terms of the corridor, that’s something we’ll need to talk to states and local governments about.”
A transport expert has dismissed the latest plan as a potential “financial trainwreck” that fails the economics test because of excessively high costs. “It appears that this latest fast train proposal is driven by funding opportunities from higher land prices which can be highly speculative and unreliable,” Garry Bowditch, head of the Better Infrastructure Initiative at Sydney University, told Fairfax Media.
