GIANT trucks will be forced to make up to 23,500 extra trips hauling grain grown in northern NSW over the next year unless the State Government spends $700,000 to upgrade and reopen a rail line it closed unexpectedly four weeks ago, says the wheat handling body, GrainCorp.
The Mayor of Moree Plains shire, Katrina Humphries, predicted there would be a serious accident involving a grain truck, as her council struggled to maintain just 40 per cent of its roads yearly, including 2000 kilometres of unsealed roads.
"It's really scary. We have kids on school buses and great big trucks rumbling past them in the dust. There will be a catastrophe," she said.
There have already been more than 2000 extra truck trips carrying 100,000 tonnes of grain through Moree's main street since the Camurra-Weemalah rail line closed on September 1, according to GrainCorp's corporate affairs manager, David Ginns.
Good conditions mean this year's wheat crop could reach 400,000 tonnes, requiring a fleet of B-doubles to replace the trains, which use only a quarter of the energy and therefore have a much smaller carbon footprint, he said.
"Growers end up paying additional transport costs and local communities pay in the form of damaged roads," Mr Ginns said.
The line's closure left about 100,000 tonnes of grain stranded in storage when growers needed to shift it to make way for the expected good harvest, he said.
The closure pre-empted the release of the Federal Government's $3 million NSW Grain Freight Review report, which is due within a fortnight.
"It is ironic [that] for a sum of less than one-third of that, this line could still be open," Mr Ginns said.
Regional sources privy to the report claim its figures are based on the amount of grain hauled on the line during severe drought, which bear no resemblance to a good year such as this one.
Ms Humphries called on housewives to speak up, saying that bread could climb to $10 a loaf as farmers bear the burden of paying for extra trucks.
"The profit margin for our farmers is so low that if they stop producing wheat, you're going to buy bread with imported wheat or you're going to be paying an absolute fortune for it," she said.
"I don't understand why they are discarding the rail line like this because we are the richest agricultural shire in Australia."
The president of the district branch of the NSW Farmers Association, Jock Hunter, said if growers had been given more notice, they could have clubbed together to lease the line.
The State Government was just "money-grabbing" through its newly introduced legislation enabling it to sell the land which rail lines occupy, Mr Hunter said.
"It shouldn't be up to the whim of a minister to close a railway line. It's a national heritage."
The services on the line were suspended because of safety issues and its long-term future would be assessed after the federal review was released, the NSW Transport Minister, David Campbell, said.
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