Annette Sharp takes a trip down memory lane on Sydney’s new tram
When Annette Sharp hopped on Sydney’s new light rail for a sneak peek last week, she didn’t just journey from Circular Quay to Randwick, she took a trip down memory lane.
Opinion
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With the peal of an electronic bell and a small jolt we slide away from the pink granite Circular Quay Station — for decades little more than a grotty ticket office and toilet stop best appreciated by the homeless and harried last-minute commuters — and are, for a moment, suspended in time at the sight of the old landmark as a fond childhood memory drifts back.
Still proud, despite the barbs hurled at it by long-time critics of the Cahill Expressway, it’s as though, in its new uncongested open plaza in Alfred St, the Art Deco-inspired station is suddenly breathing again and has never looked more beautiful.
It is, of course, the perfect stage — noble and historic — from which to launch the career of a glossy new company of dancers, now glissading sideways on and off the newly paved dais in a steady stream of movement.
As you slip along George St in one of 60 coupled French-designed Citadis X05 light rail transports, you are given your first clear view of the long expanse of bitumen ahead and the smile rises on your face as you realise this is a homecoming for which Sydney has waited too long.
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Fifty-eight years after they were scrapped and burnt — the equivalent of a shameful public flogging for the humble boxy old girls who, from 1861 to 1961, along with their horse-pulled and steam-powered forebears, had carried a century of Sydneysiders’ hopes, dreams and disappointments from the Quay to the suburbs — Sydney’s trams are back.
So much flasher than you once were and yes it is “so nice to have you back where you belong…”.
The view out the front of the tram as it slips through the low-speed 20km/h pedestrian zone is of busy Sydneysiders rushing about doing Christmas shopping, grabbing lunch, headed to office jobs, as a sea of largely oblivious humans dash across the tracks before us.
On this part of the Circular Quay to Randwick route — between the Quay and Town Hall stations — there are no overhead wires, with power supplied by an underground third rail to negate the need for additional street clutter and to enhance the view.
And what a view it is. Never did the rooftop Sydney Monorail manage to showcase Sydney to any real effect. Darling Harbour maybe, but the city, no.
At street view the light rail experience is entirely different.
As food delivery cyclists race us down George St, historic 100-year-old shopfronts give way to glass and steel monoliths, to the Harry Seidler-1960s designed Australia Square, to the grand Victorian QVB and urban chaos of Chinatown, the diverse character of Sydney shines.
By the time we slide past Central station and round Devonshire St — I was travelling a day before yesterday’s official opening and its unfortunate bloopers — you’ve experienced Sydney from a first-time visitor’s perspective and fallen in love with it again.
Along Devonshire St you’re struck by the incredible amount of development taking place along the tram route. A government source later confirms some $23 billion in new development is under way. A boon, one hopes, to the business owners who managed to hold out during the light rail’s construction.
It’s as you swing past Moore Park and the SCG at 60km/h — the maximum road speed — and head into a tunnel under Anzac Pde towards Royal Randwick racecourse, that you really come to appreciate the capacity of the system.
With each coupled tram capable of moving 450 people — the equivalent of nine buses — through the city and to the main transport hubs of Central and Circular Quay every 10 minutes, the pain of the project — the eyesores, the losses — start to be put in perspective.
As I hop off at Randwick, some 40 minutes after boarding at the Quay, I wish that it could take me further along, to Bondi and the beach, a strip overdue for revitalisation.
“Watch this space,” I’m told,