Why the Airport Rail tunnel should stop at Footscray

A rail link to Melbourne airport is something that's been talked about for a long time - since the airport was first built, in fact. And over the years it's taken many different forms, and had many different route options. But the current push really got started around 2013 under the Napthine Liberal government, with PTV's study proposing that the Sunshine option would plug into the Melbourne Metro 1 Tunnel (you know, the tunnel the Napthine government ditched shortly after, in favour of the half-baked Metro Rail Capacity Project).

But since the Andrews government picked the original MM1 tunnel back up when it came into office, and did the formal business case for it in 2016, it's been clear that MM1 would be too full of regular suburban passengers to take the Airport trains as well - so the Airport Line will need an as-yet unspecified alternative way into the city.

As I mentioned last time, the State Government has been very clear that its preferred alignment is to go from Sunshine Station to the airport via the Albion-Jacana freight alignment, but has been much less clear on how trains would get from Sunshine to the city. Lots of people - from the Federal Government to lobby groups like the Rail Futures Institute - have been pushing for a tunnel into the city, and that certainly seems to me like the most likely option. But as we've seen, the government is remaining tight-lipped until the official planning process is complete.

One of many lobbying reports seeking to use the Airport Rail tunnel for regional rail (source)

Many lobby groups have latched onto the idea of this new tunnel as not only a solution for the Airport Line, but a solution for various regional rail lines as well - to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton, Albury, Sydney...the list goes on. It's important to be realistic here - just as MM1 can't handle Sunbury AND Melton AND Wyndham Vale AND Airport trains, this new tunnel could not handle Airport trains AND all of those regional lines. It could take some of those lines, but not all of them - it would be a big boost to capacity, but it wouldn't be a panacea.

But let's assume that there will be some kind of tunnel between Sunshine and the city, and at least some of these regional lines might end up using it. What should that tunnel look like?

Indicative map of surface rail (green) and tunnel (red)

First things first - it won't ALL need to be tunnelled. I would say there is at least enough room for an extra track pair on the surface for the first five or so kilometres, from Sunshine station to near West Footscray station, though it might require some reconfiguration of the Tottenham freight yard.

At the other end, it's probably achievable to run tracks on the surface (and/or Skyrail) for the last 3.5km from around South Kensington to Southern Cross, although this bit would require a lot more reconfiguration. Not a freebie by any means, but cheaper than tunnelling (and a lot of the reconfiguration around Southern Cross needs to happen regardless of what happens further down the line).

The upshot is that the main need for a tunnel is that slightly-under-4km stretch that goes under suburban Footscray, where the corridor absolutely is not wide enough and the property acquisitions needed for surface rail would be murder.

The State Trustees building is the first of several big buildings to go up near Footscray Station

So the question is - would this rail tunnel under the suburb of Footscray include a stop at Footscray Station?

On the one hand - underground railways are expensive, but underground stations even more so. A very back-of-the-envelope calculation(1) suggests that a 4km tunnel would cost around $1 Billion, and adding a stop at Footscray would cost something in the order of $220m - adding around 20% to the costs of this tunnel section (albeit a much smaller percentage of the whole Southern Cross-Airport project). It's a cost that the government will probably want to avoid if it can - we've seen with MM1 that they didn't want to add platforms for interchange at South Yarra, despite the tunnel coming up to the surface right next to the existing station.

The MM1 tunnel portal under construction just south of South Yarra station (source)

The other "negative" that some people might attribute to a stop at Footscray is the extra time it'd take - they want an express service between Sunshine and the CBD so they have a quicker journey. In my mind there is zero merit to this - it would save less than two minutes, which is negligible in the context of a trip to Geelong or Ballarat. By all means have a super-express train in the peaks which skips Footscray (along with other stations further down the line), but not every train, all day every day.

Because on the other side of the equation, the benefits of having a stop at Footscray are pretty substantial. Footscray is a big interchange - for the Werribee, Altona and Williamstown train lines, the 82 tram to Highpoint, and a bunch of buses. Many of the people who live along these lines are a fairly key market for the Airport Rail line - people from the west obviously use the airport as passengers, but a lot of the airport's workforce lives in the west. You want these workers to have a quick and easy interchange onto the line - if they have to go all the way into Southern Cross and back out again, it suddenly seems a lot less convenient than driving.

The same, of course, goes for anyone in this area who wants to go to somewhere like Ballarat - or anyone from Ballarat who wants to go here. If I want to go shopping at Highpoint, or go for a beer in Yarraville, it's a lot quicker and more convenient for me to have a two-seat journey via Footscray, rather than changing at Southern Cross (or changing at Sunshine for a three-seat journey).

The Sun Theatre in Yarraville (via Anne Beaumont)

Even setting aside the connectivity to places further afield - Footscray is a big destination in its own right, and it's only going to get bigger. Not all the commuters from regional cities like Ballarat are going to the CBD - plenty go to Footscray to work, or to study in one of the Victoria University campuses nearby. And as time goes on, more will do so - buildings around Footscray are shooting up at the moment, it's becoming like an extension of the CBD with a rapidly increasing density of both jobs and residences. We'd be mad to want to cut Ballarat off from the jobs, education and other opportunities that Footscray presents even today - let alone what it'll offer in 5-10 years.

When we talk about "decentralisation", we need to remember that it's not just about getting people to live in Ballarat instead of Melbourne. It's also about reducing the laser focus on Melbourne's CBD - it's about spreading Melbourne's wealth-creating job centres over a wider area, to places like Footscray (and Clayton and Box Hill and wherever else). And to do that, we need a transport network that allows for anywhere-to-anywhere connectivity.

Non-radial projects like the Suburban Rail Loop will certainly help with this goal - but a hyper-express tunnel to the CBD that skips somewhere as important as Footscray would hinder it.

It may be more expensive to include a stop at Footscray - but in my view, it's worth every cent.

(1) Like I said, it's very back-of-the-envelope, but this is based on the figures from New York and Paris in this blog post. I have assumed Melbourne's tunnelling + systems costs are about halfway between the two, so $100m USD and $70m USD respectively; the New York stations are overblown pork barrels so I went closer to the Paris figure for this, and said $150m USD. These converted to total per-km tunnel costs of $250m AUD (times 4km of tunnel = $1B AUD), and a per-station cost of $220m AUD. 

If anyone has better figures, I am very open to correction - I found it extremely hard to find a reliable way to estimate this. However, the broad assertion that adding underground stations bumps up the cost of a tunnel project substantially should remain true.