Overview
Re-activating the dormant Great Northern Railway (GNR) from Armidale north to Wallangarra QLD, then onto an Intermodal Freight Hub at Toowoomba will put New England in the middle of an important freight route between QLD and NSW.
This only become possible when the Australian Government announced the termination the Inland Rail project at Parkes in central NSW, due to huge cost over runs and failure to meet the milestones set up in the construction contract.
By re-activating the GNR line farmers, growers, miners and manufacturers in QLD will have solution to get their products to NSW, ACT, VIC, SA and WA smoothly and reliably in containers. The sections of track in QLD will need to be Standard Gauge, but that also applied to the Inland Rail project. Dual gauge tracks from Wallangarra to Toowoomba would allow QLD Rail narrow guage rolling stock to use the same line.
The concept of taking this important, high volume, high value freight through New England, bi-directionally, has led to our group of rail advocates christening this route as the GNR Freight Artery.
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Possible Staging to Creat GNR Freight Artery
- Repair the existing GNR rails and sleepers to allow light weight , containerised freight to move from Llangothlin and Guyra south to Guyra, Armidale, Werris Creek to the Tamworth Intermodal Hub, where container wagons can be transferred to other freight trains bound for Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, via the existing freight network managed by ARTC.
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- Provision of passing tracks on GNR to assist bi-driectional freight traffic.
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- Completion and re-alignment of slow sections of GNR line between Glen Innes and Wallangarra, to permit freight trains to run at higher average speeds.
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Indicative Costings
Based on preliminary estimates, using per km rates for recent rail line new construction and major upgradind the early in dications are that the upgrading and rebuilding the current alignment of the GNR line, including replacing a number of bridges will be significantly cheaper than the extraordinary high per kilometer rates that were published for the Inland Rail line north of Parkes to Toowoomba.
More accurate costings will only be available when an international rail engineering partner is formally engaged for the GNR Freight artery.
John Young
Director Strategy
New England Network
20-may-2026