Beneath the hustle and bustle of Sydney’s CBD, a giant underground cavern is steadily taking shape. Behind an unassuming towering blue wall in the centre of the city, an entirely new world is taking life — and it’s one that will change the way Sydneysiders move around the city.
The enormous space currently being carved out is for the brand new Metro West line, the next stage of the Sydney Metro network that will connect the CBD to Parramatta. This specific site in the CBD will be the signature station located at Hunter Street, and when it opens in 2032, it’s expected to be the busiest station on the entire line.
Angela Jeffery, who is the Sydney Metro’s Head of Project Delivery, told PEDESTRIAN.TV: “At the peak we have capacity to be able to move 40,000 people in an hour on the Metro West project. So that’s enormous to be able to move that amount of people.
“This station will have the most escalators of any Metro in Australia, so this station is going to be an extremely busy one,” Jeffery said. She’s not wrong, 40,000 people in one hour is a hell of a lot and provides the potential to completely revolutionise the way many Sydneysiders engage with the city.
Each day workers head underground at Hunter Street to continue their progress on this massive undertaking. As they enter, they pass by a shrine to Saint Barbara — the patron saint of tunnellers — which is even decorated with fairy lights and creates a good omen of safety for the harder work being done.
Tunnellers have to brave intense heat beneath the CBD, where they can be working in temperatures up to 30°C. It’s also loud and dusty down there, so they are dripped up in special self-cooling masks, long sleeve workwear and ear plugs as they carve the largest rail cavern in Australia.
Creating this underground network is no small feat and is a massive engineering challenge. “It’s like weaving a piece of thread through a needle,” Angela said. The Hunter Street section of the project is especially tricky, this is because the new line has to navigate around existing buildings, including the heritage-listed State Library, the basements of high-rise buildings and on top of that, it’s sandwiched between the City Circle line and a tunnel filled with high-voltage cables that power the north end of the CBD.
And if that wasn’t challenging enough, the Metro team is also digging out 1.2 kilometers of turnback tunnels that will allow the driverless trains to reverse direction once they reach Hunter Street and head back out towards Westmead.
Last year when the Chatswood to Sydenham line opened, Sydneysiders became obsessed with the Metro. It quickly assessed a huge fandom, particularly with young people.
In fact, the Metro become an unlikely darling that Gen Z become obsessed with. Who would have thought young people could love a rail system so much? We asked Jo Haylen, the NSW Transport Minister who saw the opening of the Chatswood to Sydenham line open.
“I think there are so many reasons. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s clean, [and there’s] air conditioning.
“I think it also connects you to a lot of places in the city and around the North and the Northwest that people might have explored before. I’m really excited that we’re going to take it all the way through the Inner West and out to Canterbury-Bankstown”, said Haylen.
The Sydney Metro is changing the way we connect with the city. Not only is it quick and reliable, but represents a promising future for Sydney. The general public loves it and if the next stage of Metro is anything like what we’ve seen so far, the future of Sydney transport is looking bright.
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