This New York train station was the world’s most expensive. Sunshine may have it beat

When the architecturally splendid Oculus opened in 2016 as the new transport hub for New York’s World Trade Centre, its $US4 billion price tag ($5.3 billion at the time) made it the most expensive train station in the world.

The New York World Trade Centre Oculus station was the world’s most expensive to build when it was completed in 2016.Credit: Shutterstock

The cost for Sunshine station in Melbourne’s west is already up to $4 billion.

If it follows the budgetary path of the West Gate Tunnel, the Metro Tunnel, North East Link and most major projects in Australia, its final cost will put the Oculus’ gleaming white steel and glass structure in the shade.

How can you spend $4 billion on a train station?

Even within the extravagant context of major projects in Victoria, the price tag for works at Sunshine station and its surrounding rail yards is enough to make the Fat Controller choke on his morning tea.

Yet, on the day Anthony Albanese and Jacinta Allan announced this boiler-bursting sum of combined Commonwealth and state funds to rebuild a train interchange in Melbourne’s west, no one so much as raised an eyebrow, let alone thought to ask the PM or the Victorian premier why it will cost so much.

Sunshine train station pictured in 2017.Credit: Paul Jeffers

Have we arrived at a point, after a decade of the Big Build, that a billion here, a billion there and you’re still not talking about real money? Or did the fiscal harakiri of the COVID years disembowel our capacity for rational budgeting?

To answer these questions, you’d need a team of psychiatrists to put the entire state on the couch. In the meantime, there is welcome evidence this week that someone with the ear of government is trying to bring a level of financial reality back to how a debt-ridden state needs to think about infrastructure.

Within Infrastructure Victoria’s latest iteration of its 30-year strategy, you won’t find recommendations for expensive new cross-city tunnels; massive, multi-lane highways; or big, vote-grabbing public transport projects.

Instead, there are recommendations to re-route Melbourne’s tired bus network and to extend train routes west and tram routes east to provide more public transport options in poorly serviced parts of a fast-growing city.

There is a strong case made for more social housing and for governments to deliver more of the social infrastructure that newer suburbs on the edge of Melbourne and regional centres need. This includes kindergartens, TAFEs, public libraries and swimming pools.

A proposed 30km/h speed zone in residential streets, although ripe for talkback callers to lampoon, is less about managing local traffic than encouraging more kids to get on their bikes or walk to school.

The strategy also advocates greater use of smart technologies to improve traffic flows on arterial roads and smarter thinking about the way our taxes and charges apply to road users, home owners and investors. In doing so, Infrastructure Victoria has hitched itself to a freight train of expert and industry groups calling for Victoria to follow NSW in transitioning from stamp duty to land tax for residential property.

The report reboots a conversation often neglected in Victoria’s march towards a population of 10 million – the need for more drinking water for Melbourne, Bendigo and Geelong. And it politely points out that the Victorian government missed its 2022 deadline to make all public transport stops accessible to people who use wheelchairs.

According to the report, if the government continues at its current rate of upgrading tram stops, about eight a year, the work should be finished in 155 years’ time.

The advisory group has a statutory mandate to examine the next 30 years, but in this report it has a particular eye to what is practical, affordable and of greatest need within the next five. The advisory group’s chief executive, Jonathan Spear, says the recommendations are intended to extract more benefit – and where necessary fill gaps – from major projects that the state has already built or to which it is committed.

Which brings us back to Sunshine.

Amid federal-state tensions over which major projects Victoria should prioritise, the Sunshine station revamp has been variously characterised as an adjunct to the Airport Rail Link and a distant future stop on the western section of the Suburban Rail Loop.

While it is both these things, Sunshine is better understood as an important project in its own right which, once completed, will unlock capacity for more Metro trains through fast-growing suburbs in Melbourne’s west and north-west and V/Line services to half the state.

All V/Line trains running from Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo already go through Sunshine, along with the Sunbury metropolitan line and freight trains carrying containers from the docks and goods from the Wimmera. Eventually, the station will also service Metro lines from Melton, Wyndham Vale and the airport.

To enable all these lines to run trains through one interchange without holding each other up, the Metro, regional and freight lines in and out of the station will be vertically separated, over six kilometres, with an elaborate network of raised tracks. More tracks will be run between Sunshine and West Footscray and complex signalling capacity and a new platform will be installed at Sunshine.

The Infrastructure Victoria report makes a number of recommendations piggybacking off this project. They include extending Metro train services to Melton, Mount Atkinson and Deer Park, duplicating the lines to Caroline Springs and building new stations at housing estates in Thornhill Park and Mount Atkinson.

This explains why the state government considers Sunshine an essential project.

None of it quite explains why it will cost $4 billion.

A billion here, a billion there. If the government takes nothing else from the Infrastructure Victoria report, it should be to start treating it like real money.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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