If you’ve recently come up the escalators from the platforms at Melbourne Central on your way into the Swanston Street concourse, you might suddenly have found yourself looking into the future. Opposite the ticket gates, a bank of escalators rises from a new, large entrance hall connecting Melbourne Central and the new State Library station, one of the five stops in the Metro Tunnel.
The tunnel, which opens to paying passengers for the first time on Sunday, realises a proposal formally set out by Sir Rod Eddington in a 2008 report to the Brumby government but which had been in the works for nearly a decade prior to that.
Eddington had been commissioned to address Melbourne’s east-west transport challenges and backed the tunnel as essential for “an inner city that’s no longer constrained … but now includes Southbank, Docklands, and the north, where the new hospitals are being built in Parkville”, another station site.
The journey from that moment to this has had its share of detours. Then federal infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese backed the tunnel with $3 billion of federal money, only for the Coalition under Tony Abbott to withdraw that sum in the 2014 federal budget, favouring roads over rail.
The Andrews government opted to go it alone, setting a delivery date of 2026 for the project and making the biggest transformation of Melbourne’s rail network in more than 40 years the centrepiece of the 2016 state budget.
Over time the promised opening date was brought forward, with the Allan government promoting a tunnel ready for passengers by 2025. Indeed, in June 2024 builders were offered $143.5 million extra if they achieved “Day One Train Operations” by Sunday, June 29, 2025, part of “additional payments” offered to the tunnel’s Cross Yarra Partnership construction consortium worth up to $888 million to ensure the tunnel opened this year.
Some would say that target has been met, albeit with only a partial “summer start” before the tunnel is expected to begin operating to a full timetable on February 1, 2026.
The Metro Tunnel is a project for which a sound business case existed, decided upon after a report recommending it was published. Its opening will bring benefits to commuters on the Sunbury, Pakenham and Cranbourne lines but also to all those relying on the City Loop, which will gain capacity as the tunnel absorbs some of its existing traffic.
