It is the biggest single infrastructure project this city has ever seen and is so massive and expensive it will take at least another 50 years to complete and change the lives of those who live there forever. In fact, the original architects and planners will no doubt not live long enough to see the end result of this incredible railway project.
A Suburban rail loop is set to dramatically reshape a cityscape which will also include 70,000 new homes planned around six station precincts and change the lives of the city’s 5.3 million people.
Public consultation around the Suburban Rail Loop is now open for the citizens of Melbourne to provide feedback on draft planning scheme amendments and structure plans released earlier this month, with submissions closing on April 22.
The Suburban Rail Loop Authority has already received nearly 10,000 online submissions regarding the massive infrastructure project set to cost around AUD $125BN. (around £60 billlion)
It’s a metro upgrade on a scale Australia has never seen before and will take half a century to complete.
The city’s original design had all the offices and shops in a central grid. Nobody lived there, everybody lived outside of it over in the suburbs.
In the post-war period railway lines were extended into the growing suburbs to bring people in and out of the city. And it worked … for a time.
But now, people live in apartments in the centre of the city and offices have moved to all sorts of locations. The old metro system doesn’t work anymore. The once-in-a-century megaproject to address this very problem.
Not many people use the trains in Melbourne. Well, not as many as there should be. But with five million people, it has just now overtaken Sydney as Australia’s most populous city – in fact, 19% of all Australians live here.
Thanks to a construction boom over the last decade the city now has almost more skyscrapers than London and Beijing combined.
It’s been home to the Olympics, Luna Park, and Margot Robbie – before she was Barbie – and Kylie of course and Neighbours!
The B1M is the world’s largest, the most-subscribed-to video platform for construction, engineering and architecture reports: “By all accounts this should be a city with state-of-the-art public transport.
“And while it has the world’s largest tram network, its metro is decidedly lacking.”
The 2021 census data found that while some 50% of people drove to work in a car, only 3% took the train.
So the city is building more rail lines outside of the city centre known as the Suburban Rail Loop. The 90-kilometre-long megaproject will skirt around Melbourne’s outer suburbs.
The project has been split into four phases. This first section alone, covering 26km of twin tunnels and six new stations, will cost an estimated $33BN (arounf £16billion) and will be finished by 2035.
The second phase of the project, which will connect to the city’s airport, will be finished between 2043 and 2053. While the completion date for the entire loop isn’t until 2084!
Tim Gibson writing in the B1M concluded: “This first leg of Melbourne’s rail journey is set to open in just over a year’s time. And while the entire vision will take many, many decades to complete we’re already on our way.
“Melbourne knows what kind of city it’s going to be by the end of the century, and it won’t be a small one.”