Sydney’s £11bn Metro extension opens for business

In 1884, the construction of a new train station in the Sydney suburb of Sydenham was a cause for celebration. Locals were so excited that they roasted a whole bullock in a nearby paddock and held a contest to chase a greasy pig.
The dream of faster transportation has come off the rails in recent times, however, just as it has for the area Sydenham was named for, 10,000 miles away. In Sydney as in southeast London, trains were slow to arrive and quick to be cancelled, and were, on the whole, in a sorry state of repair.
Now, though, with the arrival of the underground network Australia’s largest city has wanted for decades, a great transport divide has opened between the two Sydenhams.
Leaving every four minutes, driverless trains now rocket through new tunnels deep under Sydney harbour at 100km per hour, linking distant cultural, financial and new high rise housing hubs in a city where sprawl rivals Mexico and Paris.
Sydney’s new A$21.6 billion (£11.2 billion) Metro, which opened this week along a 15km high-speed line stretching from the city’s traffic-snarled south to the leafy north across the harbour, is all glass, metal and polished concrete in cavernous new stations. It is already carrying more than 70,000 commuters during peak hours, accelerating toward its expected levels of 250,000 daily users.
The new direct trip between Sydenham, in the south, and Chatswood in Sydney’s north takes 22 minutes — slashing nearly 15 minutes off the former peak-hour trip time.
Commuters are propelled between six new underground stations across central Sydney’s financial and legal centre and stretching across the harbour through the city’s northern media and tech hubs.
Concealed deep underground in sandstone since its inception almost 15 years ago, the scale of the new 45-train system was fully revealed only on Monday morning. Planners hailed its construction by a workforce of 50,000 as the start of a transport renaissance akin to the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge 92 years ago.
The project has not been without controversy, however. It has been completed A$10 billion over budget, and the last part of the line, to the city’s densely populated southwest, will be delayed by at least a year.
Although this week’s launch went mostly without a hitch, it was delayed for two weeks after serious safety concerns emerged at the eleventh hour, triggered by a troublingly slow emergency response to a power cut that left 100 passengers stranded for two hours in mid-July.
Mathew Hounsell, a Sydney transport safety expert, believes that similar power outages are inevitable on the new line — and they would be compounded if the public announcement system in the carriages also went down.
“The worst-case scenario is people trapped under the harbour in the metro, with no staff, waiting for a dedicated fire crew who have been trained — and there’s only a small number of them,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
When The Times tried the new system in Wednesday’s peak morning commute, it was not just the speed and quiet of the line’s airy, 20 metre long, fully automated carriages that impressed, but also the spectacular new below-ground stations — all a far cry from the existing cramped and dark underground station network that first opened in Sydney in 1926.
Eman Reddy, 38, a software engineer travelling from her home at Rouse Hill, 43km northwest of central Sydney to her work in inner city Redfern for the first time on the line, was awestruck as she exited at the new inner city Waterloo station.
Reddy is the type of worker of migrant heritage that Sydney is so keen to lure into its inner city offices after the city lost more than 70,000 people aged 30-40 through the pandemic. “The new line has cut at least half an hour off my trip to work,” she said. “This train is direct and it comes every four minutes — it’s going to make a huge difference for me. And this station — I love it.”
Towering above her was a homage to Redfern’s history as the fiery birthplace of the urban Indigenous Australian civil rights movement, a 9.7-metre-high black-and-white mural of a smiling seven-year-old dancer named Roscoe, wielding a boomerang.
It is in Waterloo that planners hope the Metro will help spur the redevelopment of some of inner Sydney’s most blighted public housing towers with an influx of new apartments, some set aside as lower-cost housing.
Recognising Australia’s original inhabitants is a feature of much of the art and installations in the new stations. At the Metro’s Martin Place stop, directly beneath Sydney’s financial and legal heart, a new pedestrian tunnel echoes with a “pre-colonial symphony” of magpies, butcherbirds and owls, interspersed with vocals and instruments crafted by Aboriginal musicians.
Martin Place was designed by the London-based architecture firm, Grimshaw, and recalls London’s Elizabeth Line. Similarly, London’s global Foster + Partners are behind the striking new Barangaroo station — between a waterfront park and Sydney’s tallest building, the 75-storey Crown tower. Barangaroo links the Metro to Sydney’s bustling Walsh Bay arts and theatre precinct, its historic Rocks area, and to new high rise towers of offices and residences.
Across the harbour at the new Crows Nest station, the project’s delivery director Matt Deeks, who was involved in building London’s £19 billion Elizabeth line, told reporters that the station’s eye-catching 126,000 hand-laid brick patchwork celebrates the area’s many heritage-listed buildings.
Hounsell said the project was already a success, with commuters already choosing a network that means they do not have to change trains. “Never underestimate how much people want to save walking,” he said.