Episode

Indonesia has high speed rail. How come Australia can't get there?

Podcast: Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald
Published: May 18, 2026
Duration seconds: 1738
Processing state: not_requested
Canonical source: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/global-roaming/global-roaming-indonesia-whoosh-train-sabander-jakarta-rail/106643212
Audio: https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/02/kk/Z/ho.mp3
JSON: /v1/public/podcasts/global-roaming-with-geraldine-doogue-and-hamish-macdonald-6755533/episodes/indonesia-has-high-speed-rail-how-come-australia-can-t-get-there
Markdown: /podcast/global-roaming-with-geraldine-doogue-and-hamish-macdonald-6755533/indonesia-has-high-speed-rail-how-come-australia-can-t-get-there.md

Actions

POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/global-roaming-with-geraldine-doogue-and-hamish-macdonald-6755533/episodes/indonesia-has-high-speed-rail-how-come-australia-can-t-get-there/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/global-roaming-with-geraldine-doogue-and-hamish-macdonald-6755533/indonesia-has-high-speed-rail-how-come-australia-can-t-get-there.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

Summary

Indonesia's 'WHOOSH' train does exactly that. The high speed link from Jakarta to Bandung used to take three to four hours, now it's a 35 minute journey, peaking at speeds of 350 km/hour. It's a remarkable piece of high tech infrastructure, but it's also been the subject of corruption investigations and questions over debt to China.