Talk:Rail Infrastructure Corporation

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This is incorrect:

In 2001, the State Rail Authority had its 'above track' operations separated from its track ownership and maintenance operations. The track maintenance operations and track ownership were moved to a newly created Rail Infrastructure Corporation (RIC)

State Rail was split into four separate entities well before that following a report by Mercer Management Consulting in the early 1990's.

FreightCorp was split off as a state owned corporation, and later privatised by selling it to National Rail Corp.

RAC (Rail Access Corporation) was established as a new SOC (state owned corporation) and it took over the track ownership and train control functions in the country areas.

RSA (Rail Services Australia) was setup to take care of all the track maintenance.

State Rail continued on, owning the stations, the land, the passenger trains and the train maintenance depots.

As the track owner, RAC initially entered into contracts with RSA for the provision of maintenance services for the rail infrastructure. As time passed, RAC started to hold open tenders for maintenance services, which saw work starting to pass to the private sector. The idea was to drive RSA to lower its costs and increase efficiencies by having to compete with the private sector. If RSA couldn't lower its costs enough, it would lose more and more work until it ceased to exist. After major protests by the unions to the Labor government, RAC was instructed to stop tendering this work out, which largely undermined the reason for RAC existing.

RAC was also responsible for negotiating train access contracts with all the train operators, like CityRail, Pacific National and other private freight operators. RAC levied an access charge every time a train moved across the network, the idea being to create a level playing field between public and private rail operators.

In 2001, RAC and RSA were merged to form RIC (Rail Infrastructure Corp). RailCorp was then formed in 2004. Many staff from RIC and State Rail were transfered to RailCorp, but RIC was never merged into RailCorp. It remained as a separate company where certain discontinued functions could be "warehoused" until RIC was disbanded and shutdown. RIC should be shutdown in the next year or so.

58.164.33.158 09:13, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

• Great, if you can reference it, put it in the article.- The Fulch 12:22, 14 June 2007 (UTC)