Steve Price: When it comes to multibillion-dollar Metro train projects, Sydney won and Melbourne failed
After a trip north to see for myself, it’s clear Sydney’s multibillion-dollar rail projects could not be more different from Melbourne’s if you tried. Let’s compare the pair, shall we?
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Let’s settle in for a tale of rail for Australia’s two biggest cites — Melbourne and Sydney.
Underground rail at that! Three multibillion-dollar projects that could not be more different if you tried.
Why don’t we start in Sydney where a couple of weeks back I travelled on the Harbour City’s brand spanking new Metro train system, part of the M1 line running from the suburb of Sydenham in the inner south all the way out to Tallawong in northwest Sydney. Completed in two stages it covers 51.5km, with stage one opening in 2019.
Stage two opened three months ago and is the line I travelled on. It is amazing.
Connecting the Chatswood shopping precinct in the north to Sydenham, the driverless Metro trains — one every four minutes in peak hour — run 40m under Sydney Harbour at speeds of up to 100km/h. The new line is 15.5 km long and includes five deep underground stations that service Sydney’s CBD including Martin Place and Gadigal station near Town Hall plus the business district of North Sydney.
I boarded at Victoria Cross station in North Sydney and the first stop was Barangaroo the redeveloped office and entertainment precinct on Sydney Harbour — trip time, three minutes. I kept going to the brand-new Central Metro station deep beneath that transport hub and after a two-minute walk caught a train to the airport.
Since 2013 — so in 11 years — Sydney has managed to build stage one Metro including 23km of new track and eight new stations, using driverless trains taking passengers from Tallawong to Chatswood. Then in just seven years — starting in 2017 — an extra 30km of track were added including a twin-tunnel rail crossing underneath Sydney Harbour with a final extension to Bankstown opening next year.
Of course, there have been budget blowouts on a project of this size and complexity, but latest published figures put the total cost for both stages at around $18 to $20 billion. It’s open and running and features brand new stations underneath population centres and delivering thousands of commuters into central Sydney and beyond every day.
Sydney is a boom town right now.
Melbourne’s train story is not so good.
The two Melbourne projects are the Metro Tunnel and the dreaded Suburban Rail Loop known as the SRL.
Let’s begin with the Metro Tunnel due to open next year, allowing trains between Sunbury and Cranbourne to not stop at Flinders St Station, South Yarra or access the City Loop. The trains will — unlike Sydney — require drivers because each end of the project is old rail infrastructure.
Melbourne gets five new underground stations at Ardern, Parkville, State Library, Town Hall and Anzac.
The cost is predicted to be $13.48 billion. Following the most recent $837 million cost blowout, it is now nearly $2.5 billion over the 2017 estimate of $11b. The latest costing was revealed the day before the Grand Final public holiday when Transport Minister Danny Pearson blamed “unpredictable global issues” like Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza for the blowout.
Let’s compare the pair shall we.
Melbourne Metro at $14 billion will have 9km of tunnel and five stations running old trains compared with Sydney’s 51.5km of rail line using driverless trains at 100km/h including 30km of new track at worst case costing $20 billion. Metro Melbourne works began in 2017 and it won’t open until next year while Sydney’s stage two Chatswood to Sydenham started the same year — 2017 — and opened in August.
Then we have the money pit better known as the Suburban Rail Loop – SRL.
A reminder here to keep your eye on Sydney’s $20 billion spend and what they got for it. The first stage of the SRL — Cheltenham to Box Hill underground, is currently costed at $34.5 to $35 billion.
Construction started in 2022, and we are promised trains will be running in 2035. That’s more than 10 years from now before we have a train line servicing a minority of people who might want to go from one rarely spoken about suburb, Cheltenham, to Box Hill via Monash University. Why?
The next stage with construction not scheduled to begin for at least another five years — sometime in the 2030s — will be 34km of tunnels from Box Hill to Melbourne Airport. So we don’t have a train service to the airport from the CBD where all the train lines currently start and end, but who cares … you can get your plane if you live in Box Hill.
This one will go via Latrobe University, and I’ll be 99 years-old when it’s finished in 2053. This 19km stretch is predicted to cost $63 billion. I remind you, Sydney’s whole project was built, and up and running today, for $20 billion.
Are we bonkers in Victoria?
Just this week your government signed a contract worth $1.7 billion to build the 10km of tunnels between Glen Waverly and Box Hill with Minister Pearson making this aggressively stupid claim: “There is just simply no stopping this project now.”
How dumb can that man be? And as the Herald Sun pointed out in an editorial this week, Canberra has promised but refused to deliver any funding for the project because Victoria hasn’t been able to produce a business case to justify it. Pearson finally sent a “draft report” of costs to Canberra a day after Opposition Leader John Pesutto revealed he had written to the PM about funding.
As the Herald Sun rightly pointed out it will only take a change of Government in Canberra at the next election to leave the Victorian taxpayers with several multibillion-dollar holes in the ground and nothing to show for it. We are in dangerous territory with this thing now and here is just one example.
If you travel south on the Dingley bypass just near Kingston Road at Heatherton, off to the right is a massive building site. It has forced the closure of Old Dandenong Road and is sending the locals crazy with anger.
The huge development is opposite the Kingston Heath golf club which will in two weeks time host the Australian Open golf tournament over four days. Kingston Heath also happens to be the club of choice for our former Premier Daniel Andrews. Can you imagine how he was received in the club after a round when I reveal for you what is being planned for Kingston Road Heatherton.
It will be the stabling yards for up to 32 Suburban Rail Loop trains and access tunnels for the first stage of that multibillion-dollar money-pit between Cheltenham and Box Hill.
When locals complained about the location of the stabling yards it was revealed that during tunnelling hundreds of trucks a day would arrive and leave the site. House prices in the area have collapsed and these local don’t even get a station for their trouble.
Some spin doctor in Spring Street will accuse me of comparing apples with oranges with my Melbourne-Sydney comparison but the evidence is there for all to see — just take a trip to Sydney to see for yourself.
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