Rumours about Sydney’s new super-fast metro system have been circulating for several years, with the government hinting at a mid-2024 completion date (for the Sydney Metro City and Southwest lines) and also releasing predicted journey times earlier this year – but there has not been a whole lot more in the way of concrete facts. Today though, we've got news: the government has announced that August 2024 is the projected opening date for the Sydney Metro City line for. Yes, that’s just two months away – here’s what we know so far about the city's shiny new transport system.
The Sydney Metro City and Southwest line runs the 30-kilometre stretch from Chatswood to Bankstown, and testing on this line began back in April 2023. The super-fast transport system is set to take Sydneysiders from the recently completed Waterloo Metro Station to the Martin Place metro super-hub in six minutes, and from North Sydney’s shiny new Victoria Cross Station under the harbour to Barangaroo in three minutes. We can also expect to travel from Central to Chatswood in just 15 minutes, and from Sydenham (in the Inner West) to Macquarie University (in the city's north) in just 33 minutes.
Today, Transport for NSW announced that they’ve begun trials of the full-service timetable, and it's set to open to the public in August 2024. Until then, driverless trains will be undergoing testing deep beneath the city to ensure that everything runs smoothly once we’re allowed on board, with testing so far amounting to 9,800 hours out of the required 11,000. As well as operational tests, the testing includes simulated emergency scenarios which will involve 1,000 actors playing the role of commuters in crisis.
This major milestone comes just as work has amped up on the Western Sydney Airport arm of the project, with tunnelling now complete and a herd of actual goats currently employed on a construction site alongside 570 human employees. Now tunnelling is complete, the team working on the Sydney Metro to Western Sydney Airport project have turned their attention to constructing the six new stations set to form the line that will connect Sydney CBD to the brand new CBD that’s under construction on the doorstep of the new airport.
Though the metro project is primarily a public transport project, it ties in to the government’s plans to address Sydney’s major housing crisis. Additional measures include a focus on building more infrastructure and housing close to the metro lines, with the government’s recently-announced $6.6 billion housing project aiming to provide 30,000 new well-connected homes close to the city’s new transport hubs.
“If we are going to address the housing crisis, we have to build homes near public transport like this and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Premier Chris Minns has explained.
The next step is the conversion of the T3 Bankstown Line, a project which will see the train line between Sydenham and Bankstown closed for twelve months. Not sure what that will mean for your commute? Ultimately, it will mean a new line from the Inner West into the city running every four minutes at peak times, but we’re going to have to deal with 12 months of alternative transport methods in the meantime (more on that here).
You can learn more and keep tabs on the progress of the Sydney Metro projects over here.
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