Critical importance of Wynyard and a Transport Plan for NSW Labour to take to 2015 election

This is continuation of my "Blue Sky" Western Express proposal for 80-90 trains per hour into the CBD from Western Sydney.  My first post on this proposal is at goo.gl/hM8R5h

In my previous post, I mentioned how Wynyard station is the most important yet also most capacity constrained station in the whole Sydney rail network. The importance of improving capacity in the northern CBD is recognised by a variety of proposals, such as the prior plans for a CBD relief line and before that, the CBD Metro.  However, the flaw of both these plans is the great expense of tunnelling through the dense Sydney CBD, navigating around complex underground basements and utility infrastucture, and building expensive underground stations.  These plans were costly but in the end did not yield much benefit, as they focused on trying to approach Wynyard from the south, via Town Hall - when the southern CBD approach is arguably already well served by the multitude of existing train lines.  A cheaper option, yielding just as much if not more benefit than the southern approach, is to approach the northern CBD via Barangaroo directly from White Bay and the Rozelle Railyards, as I proposed in my previous post.  This has the obvious cost saving of not needing expensive CBD tunnelling, but does not pass through Town Hall.  Is this a big drawback or a time saving, reliability improving/simplifying idea?  I'd argue it is the latter...

Town Hall is also a busy station, but it does benefit from already having three track pairs running through it (and 6 platforms, versus Wynyard's 4 platforms in-use).   Furthermore, some detailed analysis by Kym Norley at UNSW Built Environment shows that Town Hall only adds access to an additional 12% job catchment beyond that already provided by Wynyard.

Kym Norley's catchment analysis: Town Hall has only a minor incremental
employment catchment that is not serviceable from Central or Wynyard

Some additional observations I would add to Kym's analysis is that most of the surrounding land use of Town Hall station is retail/entertainment/residential (rather than office based employment).  This land use tends to have less of a peak hour skew (often is in fact peak hour counterflow), and so has less peak hour capacity bottle neck problems than the mainly office based employment land use of Wynyard.  Additionally, Museum station is currently quite underutilised and is only 300m away from Town Hall and so could potentially be a close substitute for Town Hall, especially for Airport and East Hills line passengers.  The underutilisation of Museum station was a point made by Infrastructure NSW in it's 2012 State Infrastructure Plan.

For Wynyard however, there is no alternative station within a 500m radius and hence it will be more difficult for either Martin Place or Circular Quay to be useful as substitute stations (especially so for North Shore or Western Sydney passengers, as their train lines don't stop at either of these stations).  Developments at Barangaroo will only serve to further augment the importance of Wynyard, as highlighted by the fact that TfNSW was willing to spend $300 million to create the 180m long (short) Wynyard pedestrian walk, linking Wynyard to Barangaroo.  In my proposed rail line to Barangaroo, the station at Barangaroo will thus become a new "relief" station for Wynyard.  In this event, the Wynyard Walk will become twice as important and will likely have bidirectional flows - better utilising that $300 million investment!

Wynyard walk provides a direct pedestrian connection from Wynyard to Barangaroo

Also, the other bottle neck in the Sydney rail system is the Harbour bridge rail crossing, which my "Blue Sky" Western Express does not address. Conveniently, Kym Norley has put together a very comprehensive look into how the existing double deck train system can have 30%-40% increased capacity (ie: 26-28 trains per hour across the bridge) on the **existing** infrastructure, ie: without needing a new tunnel, or needing metro conversion, or taking over any extra lanes on the harbour bridge, and without needing complex re-building of existing in-use stations.  The key to his proposal is to put all 6 Wynyard platforms into use (currently only platforms 3,4,5 & 6 are used and platforms 1 & 2 are idle), to provide a bifurcated turnback.  Below is a diagram for the current configuration of Wynyard's 6 platforms:

To read more detail on how this bifurcated Wynyard turnback would work, read Kym's paper at:

Central city railway capacity – making better use of existing infrastructure

Together, my "Blue Sky" Western Express proposal, and Kym's Harbour bridge capacity enhancement would much better utilise the existing double deck train network, and give **greater** capacity increment than TfNSW's second harbour crossing metro rail plans (but at much lower cost and much less service disruption and construction risk).  The latter will allow an extra 30 trains per hour into the CBD in each direction (but only ~15 trains per hour initially via the NWRL), and without a separate "Western upgrade package", most of the capacity increment will go to the Bankstown and Inner West lines, rather than express services to Western Sydney.  In comparison, my "Blue Sky" Western Express will allow an extra 40 trains per hour per direction on the Western lines (with a good balance between extra express services and extra all stops inner west services), and Kym's proposal will add 6 trains per hour per direction on the harbour bridge crossing.  Admittedly, both mine and Kym's proposals only add useful capacity in one direction as there is no new CBD through-routing (although in the next post, I will outline how my proposal does allow an extra 10-20 trains per hour in the reverse direction on the city circle).  But even if we double the TfNSW metro second harbour crossing capacity increment to 60 trains (to reflect the usefulness of through-routing the CBD in each direction from NWRL & from Bankstown), this only brings it to equivalence with the 56-66 train increment to incoming CBD capacity between the combo of Kym's and my proposals (40 tph Western line into CBD plus 10-20 tph anticlockwise city circle into CBD plus 6 tph from Harbour bridge).

Special note to Penny Sharpe: between my proposal and Kym Norley's proposal, my hope is that you can put together a positive and constructive transport plan (based on better utilising the existing double deck network) for Labour to bring to the next NSW election!  I'll probably still vote for Mike Baird, but at least Sydney voters will have two positive and viable plans to choose from!

Having said all the above, I am a single deck second harbour crossing supporter, and in fact, will outline some other metro single deck conversion opportunities in future posts.  My hope is that Sydney will get all three projects in the near future: the metro second harbour crossing AND my "Blue Sky" Western Express AND Kym Norley's Harbour bridge/Wynyard upgrades!  That way Sydney can have an incredible additional 100+ trains per hour into the CBD, nearly doubling it's entire existing heavy rail capacity, and bringing in an extra 200,000 commuters per day into it's CBD.  The untangling of all the branch lines and increased use of automated single deck metros will also allow increased frequency of services throughout the day.  All this capacity "blue sky" might seem to be a bit of an overkill, but dense agglomeration of information-based workers is vital to Sydney's future economic development ... another topic for a future post!

Now that I've explained why Wynyard/Barangaroo (via Wynyard Walk) should be the focus of capacity improvements, my next post will go into the how the "Blue Sky" Western Express will work with the existing train network, and how to get the extra 50-60 trains per hour capacity from it.