Transit in the Future

The Evening News (Sydney) Saturday October 1st 1921
From the Kearney Files

Transit in the Future

To cross Sydney Harbour --- dive under it. Through a tube of course. Tubes have long been considered and the weight of evidence has decided the question in favour of the overhead bridge, but the tube now proposed differs from the old - time plans insofar that it would accommodate electric trains travelling at something like seventy miles an hour. The passengers, therefore, would hardly have time to realise that they were in the train on one side of the harbour before they were out of it on the other side. The "going" would be comparable to the celerity with which a conjurer transfers a white rabbit from a box on one side of the stage to a top hat in the dress circle. There would probably be no need for seating accommodation ; no one would have time to get seated before it would be time to get up again.
Other engineers have irreverently called the proposed tube a "switchback" because it would dive so suddenly on one side of the harbour and pop up so abruptly on the other side , but the same objection might've made against the familiar lift, which goes up and down with much more perpendicularity than the switchback. It would probably be only a question of use. At one time people were suspicious of the railway train drawn by an engine about as large as a goat and travelling at the awful maximum speed of ten miles an hour. Some day the people of Sydney will think of our present railway speeds as we think of the old bullock dray.
Speeds of two hundred miles an hour will be the usual thing and in consequence the problem of centralisation will be solved by the fact that anyone in the State will be able to visit Sydney in the forenoon and get back home in the afternoon and conversely the Sydneyite will be able to spend the day duck shooting in Queensland and the evening at a theatre in his own home town. Armindale, Dubbo, Cootamundra and Cooma will be the suburbs; and when people talk of the "back of beyond," they will be understood to mean the MacDonell Ranges.
The tube promoter's dream of high speeds is not absurd; it does not, indeed io beyond the achievements in other countries. He is merely ahead of his time in this particular corner of the planet. The "tube" could not substitute for a bridge and may not be constructed till long after the trains are whirring merrily high over the harbour, but some day more than one tube may offer the traveller a choice of routes to his suburban home.
The electric train  in the scheme is a mono - rail, a system which has large speed possibilities and may find its greatest utility in achieving the two hundred miles an hour necessary to merge most of the State into Greater Sydney. It may be fantastic, but it is not impossible, that some inventor with the imagination of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells and the practical brain of an engineer will create a hybrid between the aeroplane and the monorail. Aeroplanes avoid rail friction, but they have to carry heavy engines and fuel; the monorail reduces rail friction to a minimum and power can be sent along it -- the cheapest form of power, moreover, that which is derivable from water. There is no need for the monorail to hug the earth; it could be raised high enough to enable it's planed carriages to obtain the lifting power of the wind. There would be no need for the aeroplane to rise thousands of feet into the air if it could travel along definite routes, such as would be provided by the monorail.
The "speed" railways of the future, therefore, may be in the shape of monorail "spiders" traversed by light carriages of streamline design equipped with planes, which could perhaps be made to run as safely as the present - day railway train. Such a system could be run more economically than its equivalent in aeroplanes. It is reasonable to suppose that the economic factor may determine the evolution of transit in that way.