The southern hemisphere’s longest escalators descend a glorious 45 metres beneath Central Station to the city’s new metro platforms, but it’s the escalators on the other side of Central, near Railway Square, that have been causing the biggest fuss.
Since 2023, the two escalators that transport people from the Haymarket side of Broadway to Central Station via Henry Deane Plaza have been out of action. And for years before that, they’ve been ridiculed, vandalised and left in near disrepair.
One of two out-of-operation escalators at Railway Square, with Central Station in the background.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The situation took so long to rectify that it prompted one local, Alison Davey, to run for the City of Sydney council, arguing she’s barely ever seen them move despite being in the area for years.
“I see every day people trying to bring up strollers, suitcases. There’s no little slope you can walk up. They’re just clumping it up, it’s not easy because it’s not like a set of stairs,” Davey said.
But they could move again after the City of Sydney signed a contract to replace the aged escalators and lifts, following months of negotiations.
But these works won’t begin until “early next year”, a council spokesperson said, because “the supply and delivery of new lifts takes time”.
“Rather than continuing to repair ageing infrastructure, we issued an open market tender to replace all of the lifts and escalators which represented the best value for money for the city and its residents,” council said.
Davey, who is running with independent councillor Yvonne Weldon in the September council elections, spent the beginning of the election campaign highlighting the state of the escalators as a symbol of how the council has let city maintenance slide.
Davey has a family member with a visual impairment that makes it difficult to use stairs, and said the escalators had been out of action almost every time she walked through since moving through the area since 2021.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore cited “years of vandalism and damage” as the reason the escalators ran so poorly.
But this saga is not a unique one: broken-down escalators have been causing havoc across Sydney for years. Locals celebrated at Ashfield Mall when their escalators were finally fixed after two years. At Green Square train station, escalators between the platforms and station entries are regularly closed for being out of service.
At Macquarie University metro station on Wednesday, hundreds of people were forced to line up to use the lifts when the descending escalators were out of action.
President of the Lift Engineering Society of Australia, John Tibbitts, said escalators generally break down about once a month, because of the complexity of the mechanics and the abuse they can receive.
“Water plays a hell of a part, in any mechanical or electrical devices. It can play a very big part of it.”
That, or “they’re just bloody old”.
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