‘Huge moment’: long-awaited extension to Sydney’s metro line to open next week

The south-west metro extension will open on Friday 30 October, more than two years after the former T3 heavy rail line closed

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A long-awaited extension to Sydney’s metro line will open on Friday next week, bringing an end to more than two years of replacement buses for residents in the city’s south-west.

In a video shared on Instagram on Thursday morning, the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, announced that the south-west metro extension would open on Friday 30 October. In a statement, the government said the first service would commence at 4.31am.

Minns thanked “the thousands of commuters, families and local businesses for their patience while we’ve undertaken this major transformation.”

It comes more than two years after the former T3 heavy rail line, which serviced 10 stations in Sydney’s inner west and south west – Marrickville, Dulwich Hill, Hurlstone Park, Canterbury, Campsie, Belmore, Lakemba, Wiley Park, Punchbowl and Bankstown – closed in September 2024 to be converted to the driverless rapid transit system.

A continuous 66km metro line will span from Tallawong in the city’s north-west through the CBD to Bankstown in the south-west from Friday.

After regulator approval delayed the opening date of the city metro section in 2024, the Minns government had been at pains not to commit to a date for the south-west extension, despite media reports that it was aiming for launch on 18 October.

Last week, the transport minister, John Graham, said that the opening was “very close” and “a matter of weeks, not months” after the operator, Sydney Metro, provided the final piece of safety data to the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR).

The project to connect the stations to the city metro, which opened in August 2024, was estimated to take 12 months at that time. In the interim, commuters have had to use pink replacement buses to connect to metro services at Sydenham, where the line currently terminates.

The government says the pink rail replacement buses will continue to operate on 30 October and the first weekend of operation.

When the line opens, a journey from Bankstown to Central is expected to take 28 minutes – a six-minute saving compared with the former heavy rail line. Longer journeys are expected to yield greater savings, such as Lakemba to Victoria Cross, which will take 37 minutes – a 24-minute saving on previous travel times.

The government says the extension will deliver capacity for an additional 17,000 people during peak hours. Metro services run every four minutes during peak hours, five minutes during the day, and 10 minutes in the evenings and on weekends.

The project has been delayed amid challenges in converting the 130-year-old heavy rail line and historic stations, including the need to add mechanical “gap-fillers” to fill spaces between curved platforms and trains.

When the south-west metro opens, six of the 360 doors on the line where gaps are widest – three doors at Dulwich Hill, and one each at Marrickville, Canterbury and Campsie – will not be in use while data is collected on the reliability of the gap-fillers.

The project was first announced by the former Coalition government in 2014. Labor campaigned against it at the 2019 election but committed to completing it after Minns became premier in 2023. Amid blowouts, the city and south-west metro sections are expected to cost more than $20bn combined.

Fuente: The Guardian World