Railways in Sydney

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This article is about railways in Sydney in general. For the organisation responsible for maintaining the day to day running of suburban and intercity services, see CityRail.

Sydney, the largest city in Australia, has an extensive network of passenger and freight railways. The passenger network is a hybrid metro-suburban railway with a central underground core running at metro style frequencies, which branches out into a suburban commuter type network. The system also carries freight, and there is a separate network of freight lines, some of which are disused.

Contents

[edit] Passenger service

Main article: CityRail

Passenger service is operated in Sydney by RailCorp under the Cityrail brand. Trains operate for 20 hours a day, and over 900,000 weekday passenger journeys are made on 2365 daily services over 2080km of track and through 306 stations (including interurban lines)[1]. Suburban services operates along the portions of the mainlines that travel out of Sydney to the north, west, south and southwest, and also along several dedicated suburban lines. All of these lines have been progressively electrified with overhead 1500v DC from 1926. Most suburban services operate through the central Sydney underground network via either the City Circle (a horsehoe shaped line), the Eastern Suburbs underground line, or tracks that pass over the Harbour Bridge. There are long term plans for a new underground line passing beneath Pitt Street to a new harbour crossing (known as MetroPitt), and a longstanding concept for a new underground line that will pass down the western side of the central business district (known as MetroWest). Whether either of these will be built remains to be seen. Timetables are published for all lines, and most lines run on headways of 15 minutes in peak periods, and half hourly off-peak and weekends. Headways are closer over shared routes. Although frequencies match metro style operation in the city core, few Sydneysiders use the underground network as a metro style system, most journeys are commuter based from suburbs into the central city area. An exception to this is the Eastern Suburbs line which serves the high density inner eastern suburbs and opened in 1979.

[edit] Rollingstock

Main article: Rail rollingstock in New South Wales

All suburban passenger trains in Sydney are operated by double deck electric mutiple units. Upon electrification in the 1920s, Sydney operated single deck multiple units but these were progressively withdrawn from the 1960s until their final demise in 1993.

[edit] Depots

Electric cars are maintained at depots at Hornsby in Sydney's northern suburbs, Mortdale in Sydney's southern suburbs, and Flemington in the western suburbs. A depot at Punchbowl, in Sydney's southwest, closed in 1994 and has since been demolished. These four depots were all built and opened with the opening of electrified services in the 1920s. Heavy maintenance of passenger cars was carried out at the Suburban Car Workshops at Redfern, now closed. Heavy maintenance is now contracted out to Maintrain, a private company with workshops at Clyde.

[edit] Freight services

Freight services operate over most of the suburban railway lines in Sydney, however due to the high frequency of passenger services and the lack of freight only tracks, there is a curfew on freight movements during peak hours. There are plans to construct a freight rail bypass of the southern part of Sydney (See Southern Sydney Freight Line). There is a limited separate freight only system in the inner suburbs of Sydney, some of which is abandoned. (See Metropolitan Goods Line). Most freight is carried by the private company Pacific National.

[edit] History

Sydney rail system in 1894
Sydney rail system in 1894

The first railway in Sydney was opened between Sydney and Parramatta in 1855. This railway formed the basis of the New South Wales railways and was owned by the government. Passenger and freight services were operated from the beginning. By 1880, there was half hourly service to Homebush. In 1884, the railway opened from Strathfield to Hornsby. The North Shore line opened in 1893 to a harbour side station at Milson's Point, and was originally built because parliament thought it would be a shorter route for country produce from the north to Sydney Harbour (a role it has never fulfilled). Sydney's first deliberately suburban railway was a line to Belmore which opened in 1896 and was soon extended to Bankstown. Sydney's suburban passenger service was severely hampered by the inconvenient location of its city terminus, at the site of the present day Redfern station. Most of Sydney's population was well served by trams, and the suburban railways had relatively little initial role to play. This was to change in the 1920s.

The railway system as it exists today is really the result of the vision and foresight of John Bradfield, one of Australia's most respected and famous civil engineers. He was involved in the design and construction of Sydney underground railways in the 1920s and 1930s, but he is more famous for the associated design and construction of Sydney's greatest icon, the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The electrification of the passenger network began in 1926 with the first suburban electric service running between Sydney's Central Station and the suburb of Oatley approximately 20 km south of Sydney. In the same year, the first underground railway was constructed from Central Station to St James in Sydney's CBD . Electric trains that had previously terminated at the Central Station continued north, diving underground at the Goulburn Street tunnel portal, stopping at Museum underground station and then terminating at St James.

Other lines were quickly electrified soon after. Also, in conjunction with the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge which opened in 1932, an additional underground line in downtown Sydney was constructed, connecting the North Shore line with Central Station via two downtown stations - Town Hall and Wynyard.

[edit] Electrification timeline

New electrified lines were built:

[edit] Organisation

The rail network in the metropolitan area of Sydney is currently owned, maintained and operated by RailCorp, a NSW State Government owned corporation. Third party access is allowed to Railcorp's tracks by other freight operators under an open-access arrangement. Track outside the Sydney metropolitan area is operated and maintained by the Australian Rail Track Corporation. RailCorp operates passenger trains under the Cityrail brand, and long distance trains run through Sydney under the Countrylink brand. RailCorp was formed on 1 January 2004 by the merger of the former State Rail Authority (SRA) and the metropolitan functions of the Rail Infrastructure Corporation. Until 1972, the railways in NSW were operated by the New South Wales Government Railways until this department was replaced by the Public Transport Commission (PTC), which was also responsible for bus and ferry services. However in 1980, the PTC was broken up into the State Rail Authority, responsible for rail services, and the Urban Transit Authority (UTA) responsible for bus and ferry services. The UTA later became the State Transit Authority. In 2001, the State Rail Authority had its 'above track' operations separated from its track ownership and maintenance operations. The track maintenance operations and track ownership were moved to a newly created Rail Infrastructure Corporation (RIC). However this separation into a horizontally operated rail system was criticised for the passing of blame for rail delays and accidents between authorities, and hence in 2004, railways in Sydney became a vertically operated system again with the creation of Railcorp, a fusion of the State Rail Authority and the urban sections of the RIC.

[edit] Gauge

All Sydney trains use standard gauge, with a distance of 1435 mm (4' 8½") between the rails.

[edit] Terminology

The railways in Sydney generally use British-derived terminology.

  • Points refers to what in American English are known as railroad switches, or crossovers.
  • Up refers to the direction 'towards Sydney'
  • Down refers to the direction 'away from Sydney', or 'towards the country'.
  • Signal box refers to the signal control installation (tower in American terminology).

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ CityRail timetabling- a look inside the covers.. Railway Digest, October 2006. ARHS NSW Division.
  2. ^ railpage. railpage www.railpage.org.au. Retrieved on April 29, 2006.
Public transport operators in metropolitan New South Wales
Government
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Rail Airport Link | CityRail | Metro Transport Sydney | Veolia
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Bus
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