Sydney’s M1 metro extension to Bankstown opens after long delays and cost blowouts

The final stretch converts a 130-year-old heavy rail line into a driverless metro, a task that can be harder than building a new line over paddocks or beneath a city. Plans drawn up last decade were scaled back after it became clear how challenging and expensive the conversion would be. Plans to straighten curved platforms were dropped; Sydney Metro customer and operations head Hugh Lawson said straightening them would have required moving some stations further down the track.

The closure disrupted up to 60,000 commuters who had used the T3 heavy rail line each day. The bill for replacement buses was about $200 million. Campsie café worker Aayusha Thakuri said catching them made a one-way trip into the CBD almost 90 minutes long on occasions.

Premier Chris Minns this week disclosed that the southwest section alone cost $10 billion, making the combined Chatswood-to-Bankstown project nearly $23 billion, double the forecast of about $11.5 billion when plans were unveiled last decade. The government poured in an extra $1.1 billion after winning the 2023 election to finish the job, but was forced to add more last year.

At Campsie, café worker Aayusha Thakuri said the past two years had been hard: “I just wasted my three hours travelling [for a return trip to the central city].” Butcher Wren Zhang, who has lived in the suburb for 35 years, said the metro would bring a “very good future” and that “we need more people coming.” Belmore Cakes owner Anastasia Varsamas, who is fighting high-rise developments, said, “We’re a small community. I’d like for it to stay this way.” Her business had a drop of at least 20 per cent in trade during the rail closure, and she hopes the metro will improve business.

Experts see significant economic potential. Martin Locke, an adjunct professor at Sydney University’s Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, said the key challenge was to “realise value from upgraded transport links” and warned against “cutting the ribbon on it” without long-term land-use planning. Eamon Waterford, chief executive of the Committee for Sydney, forecast an “explosion in profitable” cultural businesses in the multicultural south-west and said job creation would likely far exceed official forecasts.

The project was nearly cancelled several times. Labor policy under leader Luke Foley before the 2019 election was to scrap the conversion; a 2020 parliamentary inquiry recommended it be ditched as not value for money; and senior figures in the Perrottet government debated abandoning it in late 2022. The Minns government commissioned a review after the 2023 election before later committing to the conversion.

Lawson, who worked on the London Overground before joining Sydney Metro, said the difficulties of working with a 130-year-old railway had produced unexpected finds: “You’re digging into a platform that’s had 100 years of who knows what going on.” He expected locals to use the south-west line for short trips between suburbs as much as for travel into the CBD, and said Campsie station would be busy all day every day. He said the decade of work was “just getting to the start line” of the changes the metro would bring over years and decades.