Inside the new ‘underground skyscraper’ built for Sydney’s Metro hub

As the new Metro comes to life, we examine the engineering and design feat that will transform our city.See all 6 stories.

Peer into the depths of Sydney’s new underground station at Martin Place from street level and you are under no illusion about the scale of a project that has taken six years to build.

The centrepiece, the massive atrium at the northern entrance on Hunter Street in the CBD, streams light on to the concourses below. It is a 42-metre drop from its ceiling to the train platforms, which are connected by several sets of escalators and lifts.

The 200-metre-long station is one of six built for the main section of the $21.6 billion Metro City and Southwest line between Chatswood and Sydenham, due to open within months.

Equating the atrium to a nine- or 10-storey building, Sydney Metro City and Southwest project director Hugh Lawson says it is effectively a skyscraper below ground: “If you actually saw it above ground it would be massive.”

The atrium was made possible by stitching the upper level of the station into a 39-storey tower built directly above, which is part of a development that will become Macquarie Group’s global headquarters.

At the northern entrance, a four-metre steel sculpture suspended from the atrium’s ceiling serves as a landmark for commuters who will soon descend into the bowels of the station.

“Tens of thousands people a day will be using this station in the future,” Lawson said. “Everything has to be scaled to manage that safely and effectively and get people in and out.”

It takes nearly three minutes to walk at a slow pace – and ride two sets of escalators – from street level at the northern entrance to the platforms, each 170m long. The station has 14 lifts and 25 escalators, and there will be about 30 shops in the cavernous precinct.

Transport Minister Jo Haylen in the Martin Place metro station’s atrium.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Lawson said the station had been designed to make it as intuitive as possible for commuters to navigate, and avoid them feeling disoriented or deep underground. “At platform level it feels quite open, and you don’t think, ‘Oh gosh, I’m 25 to 30 metres below ground level,’” he said.

The entire station is due to be completed in the next few weeks, and will then be handed over to Metro Trains Sydney, a private consortium led by Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation, which will operate the line.

“This has to be completed a number of months before we can even start thinking about opening the railway,” Lawson said.

Transport Minister Jo Haylen said the government aimed to open the rail line mid-year, but it would not do so until trial operations and safety checks were completed, and the train services were running to a high level of reliability.

“It’s a complicated, driverless, high-tech system. It takes a lot of time to get all of those pieces working, and we won’t be pressing go until they’re all absolutely working,” she said.

A bank of escalators near the southern end of the station.Credit: Rhett Wyman

With trains set to run every four minutes in both directions, Haylen said the station and the rest of the new metro line would reshape Sydney and the way people traversed it. “Its connection to other modes of transport is critical,” she said.

Via escalators and spacious tunnels, commuters will walk from the metro station to platforms for the T4 Eastern Suburbs line, along which double-deck trains rumble at the existing Martin Place station.

Alternatively, they can walk underground from the northern end and emerge from the new station’s southern entrance without passing through ticket gates. They will encounter a sound and light display in a major tunnel beneath the foundations of the heritage-listed State Savings Bank.

A major pedestrian link between the northern and southern ends of the station features a sound and light show, which continuously changes.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Macquarie’s project director for the integrated station development, Michael Silman, said commuters would get a “light and sound show” when they passed through the pedestrian link. “One of the features of the artwork is that it should be different each time you walk through it,” he said.

As part of the development, a 29-storey tower has been erected above the station’s other entrance on the south side of Martin Place.

Under an unsolicited proposal approved by the previous Coalition government in 2019, Macquarie contracted Lendlease to build the towers, as well as the station below and pedestrian connections.

About 13,500 commuters are forecast to pass through the new station’s ticket gates between 6.30am and 10am daily by 2036. It is slightly more than the existing Martin Place station’s patronage of 13,030 in the morning peak.

It will make Martin Place the third-busiest station on the Metro City and Southwest line after the metros built at Central Station and North Sydney’s new Victoria Cross station.

A four-metre steel sculpture dangles from the ceiling of the northern entrance.Credit: Rhett Wyman

Sydney Metro’s delivery director for Martin Place, Luke Garden, said the new northern CBD station was the “real jewel in the crown” of the project.

“This is the new heart of transport in Sydney, moving away from Central, especially when Hunter Street opens,” he said.

The opening of a neighbouring station under Hunter Street for the $25.3 billion Metro West line by 2032 will bring a fourth station to the northern end of the CBD. By then, commuters will be able to walk through underground links from the existing Sydney Trains and new metro stations at Martin Place to Barangaroo via the Metro West and Wynyard stations.

The main section of the Metro City and Southwest line under the harbour and CBD is due to open mid-year. However, the conversion of existing rail tracks between Sydenham and Bankstown to metro train standards is not expected to be completed until late 2025.

Converting the 13-kilometre stretch of the Bankstown line has pushed up the bill for the project to about $21.6 billion, almost twice the original forecast of $12 billion last decade.

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