Western & Northern line
* New tunnel between Granville and Croydon. Currently there are only 2 pairs of tracks between Granville and Strathfield - these are shared by a multitude of train services, including South line semi-express, all stops Inner West, Western line semi-express, and Blue Mts/Penrith intercity express trains. This section of the rail network is perhaps the most unreliable of the whole system, and when things go down there, virtually the entire rail system shuts down (except for Illawarra/Eastern Suburbs line, which runs separately to rest of the network).
* Longer (?12 carriage) trains with new signalling system for express intercity services from Blue Mountains and Penrith.
* Enhanced flyover at Strathfield ($600m) and full quadruplication of tracks between Epping and Strathfield.
Airport line and East Hills line
* Airport line apparently to be fully separated from East Hills line, and terminate at Central. New platform to be constructed at Central to allow transfer of airport line passengers onto SRT trains (for access to CBD). Presumably this new terminal would need to be designed to handle train turnbacks as well. (In terms of how airport line will be fully separate out, it has it's own tracks from Revesby to Central but currently then merges into the City Circle line with the East Hills line and Bankstown line. By terminating at Central, it will no longer merge into city circle but have a new platform for transfer to SRT).
Inner west line
* To have high frequency services
Illustrative map of current/officially planned Sydney rail network (does not incorporate the "secret plans" above)... this map is for those who don't know what the various lines are:
The plan was apparently adopted by TfNSW executives in mid-2013, so presumably supersedes all previously published plans like 2012 Rail Future and 2012 Transport Masterplan, but precedes decision to fast-track SRT so was presumably taken into account by Mike Baird and Gladys when they decided to go ahead with bringing forward the SRT.
My take on this: sounds very good so far, but unclear how TfNSW are going to fund some elements of it (eg. Granville to Croydon tunnel). Still, the major pluses are:
1. Unlocks a lot of capacity by providing Airport line it's own sector, separate from the East hills line ... potentially each line can then carry 16-20tph each vs combined maximum of 20tph. New terminal platform at Central would be a great idea if they can get it working effectively as a cross platform transfer to SRT (this is the beauty behind how the HK MTR makes transfers so super efficient and fast).
2. The 2012 internal rail futures document had the Revesby tracks (which form the western part of the Airport line) merging into the Bankstown and Hurstville local tracks to form the southern legs of the SRT, and the East Hills line was then to feed into the Airport line. It seems like TfNSW have subsequently dropped this idea and instead the SRT will run via a tunnel to Sydneham, leaving the existing surface tracks free for the East Hills line to feed into the city circle, and the Revesby line to feed into the Airport line and terminate at Central. Taking things one step further would be to introduce single deck trains onto the Airport line (luggage and double deck trains don't work well)... the Airport line essentially then becomes Sydney's 2nd metro line after the NWRL/Bankstown SRT.
3. Longer trains are most cost effective way to increase capacity on Western line, so glad to see TfNSW are getting very serious about this.
4. Full separation of virtually every existing track pair into it's own sector, to enhance reliablity and untangle the network. My count of the sectors in the post SRT plans include the following: T1 (Western/Northern/North Shore), T2 South/Inner west/East Hills, T3 Bankstown/SRT/NWRL, T4 Illawarra/Eastern Suburbs, T5 Airport, Blue Mts/Penrith intercities ... ie: at least 6 separate sectors, each operating independently without track sharing.
5. Quadruplication of Northern line should have been done a long time ago to separate out freight, express and all stops services ... it will be interesting to see how 4 tracks are divided between these three types of services.
6. Granville to Croydon tunnel seems to have come out of the blue, as hasn't been mentioned in any Transport Planning documents to date ... but again makes sense to separate out Western express, South express and all stops Inner west services (which at present all share 2 pairs of tracks between Granville and Strathfield)... again, it will be interesting to see the details of how much this will cost and how it will all work in terms of train scheduling. It will also remain to be seen how Olympic Park will fit into all of this.
7. A guess/prediction on my part about this new tunnel is that Western Express services are likely to go express from Parramatta to Central with no stops in between ... most of the expense of a tunnelled rail line are actually the underground stations more than the tunnel, so it would make sense to dedicate the tunnel to express services. That means to two surface pairs of tracks will be used for all stops/semi-express services.
8. Everything is highly dependent on SRT going ahead in timely manner, so as to provide the crucial CBD access for all the terminating Central services - Labor is going to find it hard to offer similar capacity increments without an SRT. Also, the SRT CBD stations are going to have to be designed to handle super-high passenger flows, ie: bifucated platforms, or double platforms for each track so that doors on both sides can open simultaneously and high volumes of passengers can get on/get off quickly and not interfere with high frequency train services.
This was all I could dig out so far... hopefully more will come up soon...
No comments:
Post a Comment