And how Conduit Consulting helps organisations build the case

The Commonwealth has opened the first round of the TRACK program — Transport Resilience and Capacity Kickstart — with up to $26 million available to freight customers who move additional volume from road to rail. Final guidelines were released on 11 September 2026, and the round is open now.

This is a rare piece of freight policy. Most government freight money goes into infrastructure, where the benefit reaches shippers indirectly and slowly. TRACK pays the freight customer directly, for volume they shift. If your business moves containerised or contestable bulk freight on the east coast or the east–west corridor, this is worth an hour of your time this month.

Here is what the program is, who it suits, and where most applications will fall over.

1. What TRACK actually is

TRACK is a $52 million incentive program administered by the Commonwealth Department of Infrastructure and Transport. The first round makes up to $26 million available for containerised and contestable bulk freight moved by rail.

The word that matters is contestable. TRACK is not there to subsidise freight that was always going to move by rail. It is there to close the commercial gap on freight that could realistically go either way, and currently goes by road. If your volume is already on rail, or could never leave road, TRACK is not for you.

Incentive payments are assessed against a set of criteria that includes:

• Diesel savings — fuel displaced by the shift
• Productivity gains — network and operational efficiency created
• Mode shift — the volume genuinely moved from road to rail
• Rail resilience — the contribution to a more robust freight network

The Australasian Railway Association, which welcomed the program, has framed it as addressing the commercial barriers that stop freight customers choosing rail. That is an accurate description of the problem. It is also a description of the work required to apply.

2. Who this suits

In our view, the strongest candidates are:

• FMCG and grocery shippers running regular line-haul between Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, particularly those with DC-to-DC replenishment flows that are currently 100% road
• Importers with port-side volume where a rail shuttle option exists but has never cleared the cost hurdle
• Bulk and semi-bulk movers — grain, building products, minerals, waste and recyclables — where volumes are large, lanes are stable, and road is the incumbent by default
• Businesses with a published emissions reduction target who need a funded, evidenced abatement action rather than another intention

The common thread is stable, repeatable lane volume. TRACK rewards demonstrated shift, which means you need a defensible baseline and a credible forward volume. Spot and seasonal freight is a much harder case to make.

3. Where applications will fall over

Having built the analysis behind freight network decisions on both the shipper and the 3PL side, we would expect most weak applications to fail on the same four points.

No credible baseline. You cannot evidence a shift without evidencing what you do today. That means volume by lane, by period, at a granularity your transport management system may not produce cleanly. Most shippers can tell you their annual freight spend. Far fewer can tell you their tonne-kilometres by corridor for the last 24 months.

A mode-shift case built on linehaul rates alone. Rail almost never wins on linehaul rate compared as-is. It wins — when it wins — on the total landed position: linehaul, first and last mile, terminal handling, dwell, inventory implications of a longer and less flexible transit, and the cost of the service failures you actually experience on road today. An application that ignores the first and last mile is not a serious application.

Unquantified emissions and fuel savings. “Rail is cleaner” is not evidence. Diesel displaced and tonnes of CO2-e abated need to be calculated on a defined methodology with the assumptions stated, ideally aligned to how you already report under NGER or your climate disclosures. This is the part most shippers hand to a consultant, and it is the part assessors can check.

No plan for the volume after the incentive ends. An incentive that funds a shift which reverses the moment the money stops is bad policy and, we suspect, a poorly scoring application. The strongest submissions will treat TRACK as the thing that de-risks a permanent network change, not as a one-off rebate.

4. The emissions angle is not a side note

For any business inside the mandatory climate disclosure regime, upstream transport sits in Scope 3 Category 4 and is, for most FMCG and retail businesses, one of the larger controllable lines in the inventory.

Mode shift from road to rail is one of very few Scope 3 levers that is available now, measurable, and does not depend on a supplier’s own transition plan. TRACK makes it a lever with a funded business case attached. If you are writing a transition plan this year and looking for actions with substance behind them, this is one.

We would go further: the analysis that supports a TRACK application is substantially the same analysis that supports a credible transport decarbonisation disclosure. Doing it once, properly, serves both.

5. What to do in the next fortnight

If you think you are a candidate:

1. Confirm the closing date and read the full guidelines on GrantConnect (grants.gov.au) — the published program detail governs, not commentary about it
2. Pull 24 months of lane-level volume — origin, destination, weight, cube, frequency
3. Identify your two or three contestable lanes — long-haul, stable, high-volume, where a terminal exists at both ends
4. Get an indicative rail service and rate from an operator on those lanes, including first and last mile
5. Quantify the fuel and emissions delta on a stated methodology
6. Decide whether the shift survives the end of the incentive — and if not, reconsider whether it is the right lane

That is a two to four week exercise if the data is in reasonable shape, and it is worth doing even if you choose not to apply. Most shippers who run it discover something about their road network they did not know.

6. One honest caution

Your rail operator and your 3PL will likely offer to help you with this, at no charge. Take the help — but understand that their interest is in the volume landing with them, not in whether the shift is right for your network. The commercial question of whether rail is the correct answer for a given lane is yours to answer independently.

Equally, be wary of anyone offering to write the application for a share of the grant. Contingent fee arrangements on Commonwealth funding create a probity problem you do not need.

Where Conduit adds value

We work on the shipper’s side of the table. On TRACK, that means:

• Baseline construction from your transport data, including the cleansing most TMS extracts require
• Contestable lane identification and total landed cost modelling — not linehaul comparison
• Fuel, diesel and CO2-e quantification on a documented, auditable methodology
• The written case: mode shift, productivity, resilience, and the post-incentive plan
• Ongoing volume verification and reporting once funding is awarded

Our consultants come from senior operational roles — Woolworths Group’s Primary Connect, McDonald’s, and large FMCG supply chains — not from a research desk. We have built the freight network models and we have sat in the carrier negotiations.

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Round one is open now, and roughly half the $52 million remains for what follows. The businesses that treat this as a network decision — rather than a grant application — will be the ones still carrying the volume on rail when the incentive ends.

If your east coast line-haul network hasn’t been tested against rail in the last two years, now is the time. Get in touch.