This would allow refinement of the exact route, which according to information provided to date will have CBD stops at Martin Place, Pitt St and Central. It is useful to think about the design and location of the CBD stations, as these stations will have the greatest influence on SRT capacity and effectiveness.
High speed rail blogger/engineer Zoomwhoosh has come up with some interesting ideas on how the Pitt St station could work. His idea is for the SRT Pitt St station to have a design and location that follows on from the aborted CBD Metro design, albeit with some lengthening of the station to accommodate a minimum of 8 car trains. He also proposes building a concourse and station box for a future Parramatta-CBD express rail, as some form of concourse between Pitt St and Town Hall is needed anyway to allow passenger movement between these two stations. Importantly, distance between Town Hall and Pitt St is just right to fit in a ~200m long station to join up these two stations:
Interestingly, the London Crossrail1 and Crossrail2 have taken exactly this sort of approach in joining up previously separate stations into a "super-station complex", as seen in their Liverpool St/Moorgate station design:
It seems this concept was so good in Crossrail 1 that similar designs are planned for Crossrail 2, as quoted in the New Statesman:
" ...a joint Euston and Kings Cross St Pancras station. (Yes, the trains would be long enough that the platform would have one end at Euston and the other at Kings Cross. Crossrail 1 has similar stations, one at Farringdon/Barbican and another at Liverpool Street/Moorgate, and even Thameslink, after its recent upgrades, has a station with entrances on both sides of the Thames.)"
(Importantly, Euston is also the terminus of the UK high speed rail line).
One question of interest, given that SRT planners (bound by budget and deadline realities) are unlikely to be as forward thinking as Zoomwhoosh, would be whether Town Hall and Pitt St can be linked up at a later stage (rather than being done at the same time as the construction of the Pitt St SRT station). The Crossrail approach suggests it is possible, so it seems like even if not done at this SRT stage, an east-west station that links Town Hall to Pitt St can still be done when the time comes to build a new Western express line. At the same time, Town Hall station can be rebuilt to increase capacity at this station, given it (along with Wynyard) is the bottleneck in the Sydney Trains network. Interestingly, Crossrail will be operated by Hong Kong's MTR, who will also be the operator of the NWRL and likely operator of the full SRT line... so maybe they can transfer some of this station design expertise from Crossrail over to SRT.
A key to the refurbishment of Town Hall is not only wider and less cluttered platforms, but also dual sided train entry/exit, using platforms on both sides of the train. This could give Sydney's double deck rolling stock a 50% boost in capacity by reducing station dwell times and allowing train frequencies as high as 30 trains per hour. Having said that, the SRT could (and should) have the same design in it's CBD stations to ensure CBD stations don't become a bottleneck in the future, when the SRT's quoted 30 trains per hour is no longer enough and people want to have 40 or more trains per hour.
A future post will look into design issues around the future SRT Central station and also look more into whether a rebuilt Town Hall will become a "better Central" than Central station itself - ie: become a major interchange point for light rail, double deck Sydney Trains, SRT metro and buses that can relieve/supplant the current role of Central, with the latter focusing more on providing a disbursement point for longer distance Intercity trains from Central Coast, Illawarra and Blue Mountains/Penrith and also for airport passengers.
4 comments:
Just to clarify this. The idea is that the "FastRail" terminus would run east west from under Town Hall Square to Pitt Street. So it would intersect both the existing Town Hall station and the SRT "Pitt Street" stations, but at a lower level.
The deeper level is forced on it for a couple of reasons. One is to avoid interference with the western ends of the Cross City Tunnels Another is to leave space in the north-south "CBD West" corridor.
The thing about the now defunct CBD metro is that it actually brings forward the long standing plan to have a "town square" by demolishing Woolworths and some smaller adjoining buildings. Their concourse would have been under that square.
My point is that if they do this in order to build the SRT station there is a once-only opportunity to cost effectively access the space under and around Town Hall station. It also gives the opportunity to cost effectively build an underlying "FastRail" terminus - even if the actual tunnel boring is done at a later date.
Regarding Town Hall station. The idea is to rebuild the station in place. (Some fairly crazy schemes involve new tunneling to fully or partly bypass it). What you do is add four new platforms to the sides of the station leaving the station structure and existing platforms as they are. Doing so means that each train would have a platform on both sides. Then all the platforms can be made one-directional - one side for entering the train and one side for exiting. Then the stairs and escalators becomeunidirectional and a lot more efficient. At the same time you declutter the existing platforms and provide access from the ends.
Bottom line is Town Hall gets a huge capacity increase and dwell times can be reduced somewhat.
Adding these side platforms becomes a lot easier when there is access from the surface. There is enough space on the Cathedral side albeit the Town Hall stairs is a special case. Likewise, demolition of Woolworths provides much of the space needed to work from the eastern side.
In the end there could be a common concourse serving the upgraded Town Hall statiin, the SRT station and the "FastRail" station.
This arrangement also gives the "FastRail" terminus the best possible interchange outside of Central (and in some ways better).
One other detail. Because the "Fast"Rail will require a TBM the best exit point for the TBM is Hyde Park. It leaves a tunnel behind it. So this opens up the opportunity for pedestrian access from Town Hall Square through to Pitt then onto Elizabeth and finally to Hyde Park and thence to Museum/St. James. This nay also spur further underground pedestrian/retail construction to the mall and to Martin Place.
-ZW
Thanks ZW... the Hyde park extension is interesting as it is also forms a stub for any future extensions of the rail network. In Asia, it is quite common to have shopping centres built under a park (eg. I can think of Shanghai) and having a mall under Hyde Park would be great for activation and improving safety of this relatively "dead" spot in the CBD.
Where you might also have a multi-level shopping plaza is under the new "town square" (Where Woolworths used to be).
The motivation for this is that you need to dig fairly deep to create the access paths for a deep station. In many ways it would be simpler to just excavate one large hole (as they did in World Square) and fill the space with retail and other levels.
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