Green's High-Speed Rail dreams

Well, the Greens have come up with a $9 billion plan to electrify the main trunks (NI plus SI) at least around the major cities and get high-speed (160km/hr), high-frequency-of-service trains running.

At an electrification cost per km of around $USD10m/km, that $NZD9B will extend electrification for 450 km at a USD/NZD rate of 0.50.

But I suspect the proposal has at least five deep flaws:

1. 1 - To let pax rail run in two directions, double-tracking is needed. That's probably north of $50m/km. Christchurch is the testbed here: there's no double-tracking, few passing sidings, no stations, no pax-capable signalling, and so on. Even if a slew of passing sidings is posited, that's gonna reduce that 160km/hr max speed to maybe a 60-80km/hr average. Not that much different to a bus or car. Suppose (say) a 15min frequency for three hours twice a day, over a 70km single trip at 70km/hr, and assuming instant turnarounds, that needs four trains per direction per hour on that trip. That's three or four crossings if single-track for the returning units.
2. 
   
3. 2 - Stations, signalling, ticketing, and meshing with last-mile services. No use turning up at the nearest station to your workplace (like Christchurch Airport freight ops) and finding you have 8-10km still to go and no last-mile PT. All this stuff is expensive, and uncosted, I suspect.
4. 
   

3 - Electrification is absent in the middle third of the NI, and absent from the SI except for heritage stuff through the Arthur's Pass tunnel. By no coincidence, these are the very parts that are toughest to electrify at all: tunnels, bridges, tight curves, high (for rail) gradients). The cost/km is likely to be an order of magnitude higher in these areas.

1. 
   
2. 4 - Where is the power to come from? A single source of power (overhead catenaries, substations) is vulnerable to outages which stop the entire block section - er- in its tracks. And, especially in the NI, there just isn't the spare capacity to impose significantly higher loads: most daytime top-up power comes from SI hydro. Perhaps Tiwai closure is part of the Green's assumptions. But there's still no way to get That power from the deep south to Auckland without expensive line duplication or upgrades (last estimate was north of 0.5B and that was some time ago).
3. 
   
4. 5 - Patronage in those shiny new commuter trains. It's all very well creating them, but who is actually going to use (say) a Hamilton-Auckland route, and in sufficient numbers? The sectors that can't or won't include tradies, the elderly, the very young, the WuFluFearFull, the poor and the unemployed. That's a big chunk of potential patrons.

Can't see it going anywhere but Off the Rails......