Suburban Rail Loop: Stations for $34b project to be built up to 24m underground

Passengers on the $34.5b suburban rail loop will travel up to 60m underground, bypassing jam-packed roads as they travel across Melbourne in style.

An artist’s image of how Monash station will look as part of the Suburban Rail Loop. Picture: Supplied

Passengers on Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop will be travelling up to 60m underneath ground with stations to be built closer to the surface to create shorter journeys up and down escalators.

Leader can reveal the planned Monash SRL station will be the deepest of the stations on the 26km first stage of the project, which is set to cost up to $34.5b and be completed by 2035.

Box Hill’s station at the end of the SRL East route will be built slightly higher at 23m below street level, while others at Cheltenham, Clayton, Glen Waverley and Burwood are tipped to range from 17m to 23m.

At its lowest point, SRL passengers will travel up to 60m underground, but the exact location is yet to be revealed by engineers.

The Suburban Rail Loop’s East route is set to be delivered by 2035 and stretch from Cheltenham to Box Hill. File picture.

Monash’s SRL station will be built 24m underground. Picture: Supplied

The station locations will generally be closer to street level and mean shorter journeys up and down escalators compared with the under-construction Melbourne Metro Tunnel.

Workers have drilled 20m underground to build the tunnel’s Arden station and up to 42m for the State Library station.

The lowest station on the city loop is Parliament at 38m underground.

Suburban Rail Loop Authority executive general manager of rail and infrastructure Nicole Stoddart said the positioning of the stations was based on geological and technical assessments of land along the proposed route.

“We want to make sure customers have the best experience and that they don’t have to climb from the depths of the earth to the surface,” she said.

“The design will respond to the geological conditions, standards and grades which trains can climb and decline … and we are taking into account all those factors to get the best outcome.”

Artist impressions for the Monash SRL East station and the authority’s vision for creating job and activity hubs around each of the stations were revealed by the Herald Sun earlier this month.

The authority has so far drilled more than 10km of earth along the route to gain information about local ground conditions.

About 300 homes across the route from Cheltenham to Box Hill are expected to be acquired by the state government to build the project.

Leader revealed earlier this month a century-old home and about 100 apartments in a nine-level building in Elland Ave, Box Hill, are in the proposed path.

Ms Stoddart said no homes in Monash or Cheltenham and only a handful in Burwood would be required, with the majority of acquisitions focusing on commercial and industrial land.

The full impact of the proposed project will be revealed when its Environmental Effects Statement is released at the end of this year.