Revealed: How Sydney’s $8.3b metro will operate as it prepares to open in nine days
The 22 Metro trains built by Alstom are so advanced they will wake themselves up each day at the depot, drive to their first stop, return at night and keep to the timetable to fractions of a second.
Sydney’s newest Metro trains are reminiscent of Thomas the Tank Engine, the cheeky little blue steam train which would rouse itself every morning and happily chuff off to work.
The 22 Metro trains built by Alstom are so advanced they will wake themselves up each day at the depot, drive to their first stop, return at night and keep to the timetable to fractions of a second.
The trains have conducted more than 245,000km of testing and will have completed close to 500,000km by the time the $8.3 billion Metro Northwest opens in just nine days on May 26.
The 36km line from Tallawong to Chatswood has 13 stations, where the driverless trains will arrive every four minutes during peak hour.
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The heart of the entire Metro system is the Operational Control Centre, which is located next to the train depot at Tallawong in Sydney’s northwest.
One room is filled with extremely powerful computers which monitor the position of the trains along the railway and constantly calculate algorithms based on their location, speed and weight.
Another room contains a backup power generator battery, which will ensure the whole control centre can keep operating in the case of an electricity blackout.
The main hub of the control centre is a large open plan room filled with desks, all facing a wall of large TV screens which display the location of each train and the direction it is travelling.
Cory Roeton is the senior manager of network control for Metro Trains Sydney and is in charge of about 40 people who work in the control room around the clock.
Mr Roeton said the Metro trains are some of the most advanced on the planet, and run to a very strict testing timetable each day, which begins at about 4:30am and finishes at about 1am.
“The whole railway just starts up automatically … the trains wake up, do a self-test, test the airconditioning, test the lighting, test the mechanics of the train, and then within 15 minutes, once all that has gone through and it spits out to the central computer we are OK to depart, then the train will depart on its usual timetable,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“As the trains are woken up, they have a progressive time right down to the second where the train will depart the depot, present itself to the main line for the first customer, and then from there the timetable just brings trains out every 10 minutes, and then we wind it down to every four or five minutes.”
Mr Roeton said the timetable was incredibly sophisticated and ran the Metro trains to the second.
“On a Sydney Train the announcement might say the train is due at Chatswood at 12:23pm, well here to maintain and run our timetable it will be 12:23pm and 0.02 seconds,” he said.
“Due to the automation you can stop a train and send it the other way within seconds — Sydney Trains allow five minutes for that.”
Chief train tester Manny Manolis said the first test drive occurred less than two years ago, with the train being operated the old-fashioned way by an experienced Sydney Trains driver.
“Our first train movement was the 22nd December 2017, that was just out of the shed and in, that was manually driven,” he said. “The first time we ran it automated was a mind-blowing experience, seeing what it can do.”
Mr Manolis said during testing his team tried to “trick” the train, but it “passed with flying colours”.
“All these tricks, like wrong routing, sending it wrong signals, and the train system obliges to all that and pulls the train up, so the safety element is extremely high,” Mr Manolis said.
International design firm HASSELL were the architects and landscape designers for the 13 stations and precincts on Sydney Metro Northwest.
“The design all comes from the overarching idea that the customer is the centre of everything,” principal Ross de la Motte said.
“In the past major engineering projects have been about the engineering, speed, economy, structure, making it safe, but to actually have a project where its fundamental, driving imperative is to make it a beautiful, welcoming place for people drove everything.”
Mr de la Motte said letting natural light into the underground stations, the large outdoor gardens and unique station colours were key design features.
“We happened to start out west with green, and we went through the colour spectrum right into the city which is deep blues,” he said.
“There aren’t many stations in Sydney that have big open plazas or gardens as an integral part of the station.”
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