In April last year, US President Barack Obama painted a picture of no-hassles intercity travel for his country.

“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” he said.

“No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes,” he continued.

And then he built the rhetoric: “Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination.”

The clincher: “Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.”

Devised in part to drive economic recovery of the United States post-2008 global financial crisis, this was the President’s vision for high-speed rail in the US.

But it wasn’t just rhetoric. In January, Obama’s government funded $8billion worth of projects across the country.

The United States, China, Japan and Europe are racing to build to the biggest, best and fastest intercity rail networks. India and even Morocco are among the countries reportedly planning high-speed train networks.

In Australia, the world’s flattest continent, the potential for high-speed rail has been ignored by most political leaders and considered a pipe dream by business executives.

The idea has been derailed and left behind by successive failed proposals stretching back as far as 1984, when the CSIRO first championed the cause.

A number of prominent Australians are still prepared to give the concept their support.

Greens leader Bob Brown is one such individual.

In April, the Tasmanian MP was at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station to launch a Greens proposal for a major concept study into a high-speed train on Australia’s East Coast.

Mr Brown argued the Sydney-Melbourne air route is one the busiest in the world and the train could provide fast, reliable transport to 75 per cent of the Australian population.

“The high speed rail would reduce greenhouse emissions from transport and congestion on the high demand Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane flight routes and accident-prone Pacific, Hume and Princes highways,” he said. “Newcastle and Canberra could be connected to the network.”

The Canberra Business Council supports Mr Brown’s assertions.

In a 2008 submission to Infrastructure Australia - a Federal Government instrument meant to set infrastructure priorities - the Council said negative arguments about population size were irrelevant.

“What matters is travel on specific routes,” the submission said.

A 2010 report by the Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation was also highly optimistic about the potential for high-speed rail in Australia.

The report said high-speed rail could be expected to make a “transformational contribution to Australia’s long-term transport needs.”

It found fast trains could address airport congestion and assist in reducing environmental damage caused by existing transport modes.

It also found some of the problems associated with earlier proposals had been eliminated.

In May, Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development Minister, Anthony Albanese, acknowledged the potential importance of fast rail to Australia.

“There is no doubt that an expanded rail network would have benefits for economic productivity as well as the sustainability of our cities and regions,” he said.

However, a spokesman for Mr Albanese later said the short-term focus for the Government was to “restore existing infrastructure and the rail network”, especially for freight.

The spokesman went on: “there are a number of private organisations who have long been advocating a very fast train and it is incumbent on them to do the work to back up the project they are advocating.”

Mr Albanese himself sounded the death-knell for those hoping the Commonwealth would join the early planning phase for Australian fast rail.

“We welcome a discussion on any very fast train proposal which has its planning and financing properly assessed,” he said.

In other words, if the Greens or the Canberra Business Council want to see the proposal move from the planning to pre-construction stage, they have to do the groundwork themselves. 

Mr Albanese’s spokesman also wondered what ticket costs might be, how many millions of dollars of capital outlay would be required, and whether the network owner might actually see a financial return.

However, last week the Government announced their intention to fund a feasibility study for a fast rail network on Australia’s east coast.

The first segment of the line would be built between Sydney and Newcastle with a view to Canberra and Melbourne segments down the track.

Europe’s most prominent high speed rail, France’s Train à Grande Vitesse, entered service in 1981.

Throughout the 1980s a spiderweb of high speed rail networks began to entangle Europe and, in 1994, the Eurostar began service under the English Channel, connecting the United Kingdom to the rest of the continent.

Since then, the network’s growth has continued unabated, with expansions into Belgium, Spain, Poland and Italy.

The Californian government is proceeding with a rail network stretching for more than 1280 kilometres - a Sydney-Melbourne line would cover about 900km - while many other large US cities are also set to benefit.

President Obama even has two inter-country lines in the making.

They would link Portland, Seattle and Vancouver on the west coast and Washington, New York, Boston and Montreal on the east.

Back in Australia, reports from the Cooperative Research Centre for Rail Innovation, Greens policy proposals and submissions by the Canberra Business Council seemed unread and unheard by those with the power to kick-start the process and finally move the fast train network out of the siding yard.

Unheard, that is, until Mr Albanese’s announcement last week.