The grand plans that would have changed Canberra as we know it

Afterwards, you head into the city to meet up with friends who have just come in from Sydney for a night out via the fast train. It sounds crazy right? But had a different decision been made here or there, that could have been our Canberra.

We've dusted off some of the forgotten plans that could have changed the city as we know it.

Canberra received 4.99 million visitors last financial year, but how many more people do you think would have come here if we had a cable car running up one of our iconic mountains?

In 1975 a group of Canberra businessmen filed plans with the Department of the Capital Territory to build a cable car or aerial gondola on Black Mountain.

The $2 million proposal included 35 cable cars, whizzing 800 passengers an hour up the mountain for $2 a ticket, records dug up by ArchivesACT show. Sounds optimistic right?

Well actually, a 1977 tourism study ranked Black Mountain as the tenth most popular attraction in Canberra.

A 1982 feasibility study revealed almost one in five visitors to the city included Black Mountain in their itinerary.

For context, Telstra Tower had opened in 1980, and quickly become more popular than the War Memorial. The tower had 42,000 visitors in its first year, but there were serious access and parking issues on the mountain.

The company estimated 30 per cent of visitors to the mountain would use the gondola, and with tickets now priced at $2.80 per adult and 80 cents for a child, they reckoned they could make nearly half a million dollars a year.

So why do I have to drive up the mountain like a chump instead of gliding majestically over the bush?

According to a Canberra Times article from 1983, then territories and local government minister Tom Uren knocked back the proposal on environmental grounds.

Decades before The Code or Secret City , there was a proposal for a $35 million film studio in the capital.

In 1981, a Perth company called United American and Australasian Film Productions Pty Ltd approached the Department of Capital Territory with plans to build a 25-hectare film studio in Canberra, according to ArchivesACT.

It picked Canberra because of its "lack of air pollution, ease of movement, variety of landscapes and access to other scenery eg coastal and mountainous areas".

The company set its site on the Weston Creek sewerage works off Cotter Road for its campus, and hired the firm that designed the National Carillon to produce concepts.

In 1982, minister for the capital territory Michael Hodgman and the company put out a press release, predicting construction on "Studio City Canberra ... the largest facility of its kind in the Southern hemisphere" would begin within a year.

So what happened?

A young John Winston Howard.

In 1982, Mr Howard as treasurer closed a taxation loophole that had allowed film studios to potentially receive a 375 per cent tax write off on their first year's investments.

The write-offs had been intended to stimulate the local film industry but instead resulted in an unsustainable production bubble.

When the loophole vanished, so too did interest in the Canberra studio.

You know that fancy new park that was opened earlier this year where the Westside container village used to be?

That's stage one of the City to Lake project, an ambitious plan to overhaul the West Basin of Lake Burley Griffin, which included a new stadium, a swimming pool in West Basin in front of the Australian National University, a convention centre straddling Parkes Way, and new apartment buildings beside the lake and on Commonwealth Avenue.

Among the grand ideas for the West Basin precinct was a 2014 proposal for an urban beach on the lake, with an adjacent swimming pool.

Part of the lake was to be cordoned off, cleaned and heated with geothermal technology.

Water safety experts said it was a realistic and overdue proposal.

In 2015, Andrew Barr said the beach and the swimming pool were "in their thinking for the next parliamentary term".

So where's our beach?

An ACT government spokesman said it was still tossing up what to do with aquatic facilities in the city, given the current situation at the city pool, as well as the development of the Stromlo pool and an aquatic facility at ANU.

"The potential for geothermal heating of pools was one element of the early-thinking by a consultant for the aquatic/recreational facilities that would make-up part of the extensive public areas in the redevelopment of West Basin. However, testing concluded that geothermal heating would not be feasible in West Basin. It has never come before cabinet and it is not being considered," he said.

It's worth noting the city stadium and a new convention centre haven't quite been struck off the long-term infrastructure priority lists, although they are well below light rail, the new SPIRE centre at Canberra Hospital and the overhaul of the Canberra Theatre precinct.

However a parliamentary committee noted earlier this year the Australia Forum convention centre was unlikely to proceed in its current UFO-like form.

Long before light rail to Gungahlin broke ground, ACT politicians were talking up a "next millennium" technology to get Canberrans out of their cars.

Australian company Bishop Austrans put a proposal to the ACT government in 1998 for a network of eight-person driverless capsules that would eventually transport Canberrans from the city to the airport, the Museum of Australia, and eventually across the city.

The company had secured the "one of the biggest R&D; grants ever" of $14.3 million from the Industry Research and Development Board, then chief minister Kate Carnell told the ACT Assembly in 1999.

It was then courted by a consortium - including the ACT government's trade arm CanTrade, the National Capital Authority, the CSIRO and the Australian National University - to base its operations in Canberra.

Ms Carnell committed $5 million of ACT taxpayer money to helping set up a test track in Canberra within 12 months.

The demonstration site was to have been on the north side of Fairbairn Avenue between Majura Road and Northcott Drive, with a three-kilometre test track.

However the futuristic project was never realised.

While a question on notice from July 2000 said the government was still working on the project with the company, it seems to have disappeared after Ms Carnell was force to resign as chief minister in October of that year.

While the prospect of fast rail to Canberra has been making headlines for decades, a plan to take the train line through Mount Ainslie right into the heart of Civic reportedly left some bureaucrats aghast.

The radical plan was one of three options presented for fast trains into Canberra presented to then prime minister Julia Gillard and her infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese in 2012.

After four kilometres of tunnel passing through the mountain, the line would continue down Ainslie Avenue and terminate in Civic.

It was expected the three-platform station under Ainslie Avenue would eventually serve more than 3000 passengers in peak hour.

However the ACT government called for big changes to the route in 2016, saying it should go to Canberra Airport rather than into Civic.

Instead, the rail line would be connected to Civic via light rail, the territory said.

However the proposal has remained parked, although the federal, NSW and ACT governments have all committed more money to additional studies on fast rail in the past 18 months.

Given every federal government since the 1980s has looked at high speed rail but never taken it past the planning stage, Mount Ainslie appears to be safe for now.

Have we missed a grand proposal? Let us know in the comments below.