Australia

Missing from the article:

You can drive it in about 3 hours (depending on traffic).

The “future improvements” should involve gradually rebuilding the line into a high-speed line: straighten out the slowest steam-age curves, replace alignments with new, faster ones, and add electrification (cascading the XPTs as spares to the Melbourne and Brisbane lines, where they’re needed for sleeper services). If you can get it to 200km/h (much faster than the current trains but slower than the current definition of “high-speed rail”) that’s the journey in under 2 hours, competitive with the busy air route. If you can get it to actual HSR speeds, it’ll be a good basis for the eventual line to Melbourne.

And all this can happen while the nation’s generation-defining high-speed-rail project is slowly thrashing out a regional commuter line to Newcastle.

Is it going to be actual high-speed rail (>200km/h), or just something pretending to be high-speed rail?

Bringing it on to line with european capabilities of about 1955. For heaven’s sake, its a 325km trip. A train from Japan, anywhere in Europe, China, Pakistan, India could do that trip in an hour. Why does Australia try so hard to shoot itself in the foot.

Now it just needs to be faster than cars

noice. its not a lot of coin, but credit where its due.

could line up nicely with the xpt replacements currently in testing (improved comfort and reliability).

no its not new high speed line, we are all going to be well dead before that's up and running, iterative improvements in the mean time is not a bad thing.