Cattle cars to the future: O’Farrell’s rail vision

I was tucking into one of Joadja’s celebrated Mega Vegetarian all-day breakfasts when I noticed Bruce and Tarkis from Bruce Tarkis Creative, the advertising agency around the corner wander into the cafe. Bruce was brandishing his iPad, which always meant he was going to share something.

“Did you see where they’re deliberately going to build the tunnels for the North West Rail Link just 40cm too small to take modern double-deck trains? It’s absolutely nuts! It means that the line will forever be limited to single-deck metro-style trains where most peak period passengers would have to stand – some of them for a 40 km trip.”

“You’ve only just caught up with that?” I asked.

“Well, it’s been in the papers a bit, but now there’s this great little documentary by the EcoTransit Sydney people on YouTube – it’s called Unfit for purpose”.

It so happened I was doing an investigation into the whole, forthcoming, $8.5 billion public-private ‘partnership’ scam. I couldn’t tell them that I’d been told by an engineer for one of the companies bidding for the tunnelling work that his company had strenuously questioned the wisdom of the narrow tunnel decision, but that they’d been told they should tender only for the small diametre or bugger off.

“Aw, why should we give a damn about the North West Rail link? I’ll probably never ever go up to The Hills or Cherrybrook or any of those places. I’m not a Hillsong Bible-basher and I don’t even go that far on my holidays!” said Abdul the Cabbie at the next table.

“Trust me, it’ll affect you, even if you never go north of the harbour” said Bruce.

“How does that work?”

“Well, it affects more than just the new bit of line from Epping out to the north west, because O’Farrell’s going to give the existing Epping to Chatswood tunnel to whatever private operator wins the contract to run trains on the North West line and they’re going to modify the line so CityRail trains can’t use it.”

“Hang on,” said Dennis the accountant. “My wife teaches at Macquarie Uni. Do you mean she’s going to have to change at Chatswood after the private gang take over?”

“You got it,” I said. “But that’s only the start of it. See, the government also reckons that when they do finally build two more tracks south from Chatswood, across the Harbour and under the CBD, those tunnels will also be built only for the non-standard single deck trains.

“And, as everybody ought to know, the reason why CityRail can’t put on a lot more train services right across Sydney is that there’s only two tracks across the Harbour Bridge, and those two tracks can only, theoretically, carry about 24 trains an hour. So the Harbour Bridge is the choke point, as far as rail is concerned. But if we had two more tracks from Redfern up to Chatswood, you could increase CityRail services to every station in Sydney by 50 per cent.

“What that means is that a CityRail station that now has only four services an hour, could have six services… one every ten minutes.”

You could see Dennis’s brain ticking over. “And a station with six services could have eight or nine. That’s like one every seven minutes. Hey, that would be a vast improvement!”

“Yeah. At the moment CityRail carries a million passengers a day, but it could easily carry a million and a half.”

“So you’re saying that, if they built the second harbour crossing with these small-bore tunnels, CityRail, which serves most of Sydney could never increase its services? That they’d be frozen out forever?”

“That’s the game plan”, I said. “The way they’re planning to do the North West Rail Link is an entering wedge for breaking up and privatising the system. The Transport for NSW plan is to lock out CityRail so they can replace our comfortable, modern, high capacity trains – where most commuters get a seat – with low-standard, low-capacity, privatised, cattle-car services. It’s.”

“But that’s madness,” said Dennis. “People are trying to limit the amount of driving they do, especially for the daily commute, and with petrol going up like it is, I reckon we’re going to need every bit of capacity on the trains we can get.”

• ‘Unfit for purpose’ can be seen on the EcoTransitSydney YouTube channel.