By Lynda Myer
Located between Chatswood and Sydenham, the 15.5km twin tunnels have been completed by the final piece of track, hence a significant milestone in delivering Australia’s biggest public transport project was attained.
As the historic metro services, which is undergoing below Sydney Harbour and beneath the Sydney CBD for the first time, completing trackwork on the Sydney Metro City & Southwest lines led to sooner access of customers to this service.
Completing the construction process of these tracks required 18 months time period and over 500 workers.
In order to embed around 45,000 sleepers which supported 62 kilometers of Australian steel rails with a combined weight of about 4,000 tones, over 40,000 cubic meters of concrete (enough to fill more than 16 Olympic swimming pools) was used.
Considering that currently, the track laying is complete, the operation of rolling out the hundreds of kilometers of high voltage power cables needed to energize the driverless metro trains, is done by workers using railway wagons, fitted with large cable drums.
The determined date for linking the new Sydney Metro City & Southwest Line with the existing Metro North West Line is later the current year, while it is due to be ready for train testing to commence along the new alignment in 2023 ahead of passenger services starting in 2024.
