Why Sydney needs to bring back this abandoned ‘missing train link’ from the ’80s

A missing rail link from Sydney’s south-west to Port Kembla and Wollongong must be completed to realise the potential of western Sydney’s new airport and the growing Macarthur region, the NSW government has been told.

The Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, a lobby group, will on Friday launch a campaign to connect Port Kembla to Macarthur via a dual-track railway that meets the main southern line at Maldon, near Picton – a project that was started but abandoned in the 1980s.

The group is lobbying for better freight rail connections in Sydney.Credit: Nick Moir

The group says a train line capable of carrying freight and passengers between Wollongong and Wilton – a housing growth area south of Macarthur – in 20 minutes would “pump blood into the arteries of this powerful economic zone”.

Port Kembla, Moorebank Intermodal Terminal, and Western Sydney Airport were internationally significant gateways with little connection between each other, the group said, and “as long as these assets remain disconnected, the opportunity to saturate jobs and innovation together is wasted”.

The group’s chief executive, Adam Leto, said south-west Sydney and the Illawarra shared a high concentration of construction, health, retail and education workers.

“They are two working-class regions [that] understand the value of hard work,” he said. “There needs to be a strategic lens applied to those two areas together, not in isolation.”

A partly built bridge on the incomplete Maldon to Dombarton line.Credit: Nick Moir

Last year, BlueScope unveiled a 100-year master plan for surplus land around its Port Kembla steelworks, and the Dialogue said leveraging the manufacturer’s green steel capabilities would support the transition of manufacturing and construction in western Sydney to net zero.

“Put simply, connecting Port Kembla to south-west Sydney will ease supply chain pressure and contribute to the acceleration of housing builds to meet new targets,” it said.

There is a single-track rail link further south, from Moss Vale in the southern highlands to Unanderra in the Illawarra, running through Dombarton, near Port Kembla. In 1983, work began on a line going north-west from Dombarton to Maldon, a distance of 35 kilometres, but it was suspended in 1988 “due to an economic downturn and the forecast growth in coal traffic not eventuating”.

A bridge and some tunnel portals were completed, and the corridor was preserved. In 2014, the state government opened an expression of interest for the private sector to build and operate the line, but it found ongoing public funding would be needed to make the venture commercially sustainable.

Leto said the context had changed a lot since the 1980s, with the new airport due to open in 2026, Port Kembla flagged as the state’s second container terminal and tens of thousands of new homes planned for Wilton, Appin and the south-west growth area.

“The imperative [for the project] hasn’t been as clear as it is today,” he said, adding that the main southern line between Macarthur and Picton must be electrified, too.

Freight rail access to Port Kembla has been on Infrastructure Australia’s priority list since 2016, particularly the need to improve the efficiency and reliability of freight movements between the port and intermodal terminals in western Sydney.

The IA listing notes this could occur through enhancements to the Moss Vale-Unanderra line, “or through future development of an alternative rail alignment to the port”.

Planning Minister Paul Scully, who is also the MP for Wollongong and will appear at a Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue event on Friday, made no commitment to a Macarthur-Port Kembla link when asked on Thursday.

But he said the government’s $10 million Illawarra Rail Resilience Plan would examine a range of options “and provide a road map for the best value investments we can make for rail infrastructure improvements for our region”.

“Unlike the previous government, the Minns government understands the social, economic and employment significance of better connecting these two important economies in NSW,” he said.

The resilience plan, announced in last month’s budget, appears to prioritise improvements to the South Coast line between Sydney and Wollongong, saying extreme weather over the past three years had made upgrades “vital and urgent”.

A spokesperson for federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said the Commonwealth worked closely with NSW on significant infrastructure, and “should this project be identified as a priority for federal funding, it would be considered through the usual budget processes”.

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