A proposal to build and operate a private rail line from the city to Melbourne Airport at no cost to the public purse was rejected by the Andrews government despite being backed by Metro Trains Melbourne (MTM).
The 2015 plan was for a purpose-built, direct, fast-speed railway through Maribyrnong which would have offered baggage check-in at Southern Cross Station and 18-minute trips to Tullamarine.
A fully developed blueprint, put forward by a private consortium involving MTM and financial services giant IOOF, was never considered by cabinet. Instead, the idea was killed off by senior government representatives who made it clear that any future Melbourne Airport Rail Link (MARL) had to go through Sunshine.
The revelation follows allegations before the Big Build royal commission that doctored cost estimates were included in MARL planning to bake-in Sunshine as the preferred route. It raises further questions about the integrity of Premier Ben Carroll’s priority project, which the Coalition is also committed to building along the Sunshine route.
The proposed private railway, which would have been completed years ago had it been green-lit by the state and federal governments, was dependent on an associated land deal where the consortium would be given development rights to create a new residential suburb at a disused defence site.
The Maribyrnong Defence Site, 127.8 hectares of riverside land just 10 kilometres from the CBD and previously used as a munitions factory, has been abandoned for 20 years.
An open market tender to select a developer closed 18 months ago, but a result has not been publicly announced. The future of the site is complicated by the expense of remediation work required to make it safe for residential development.
Two sources aware of the MTM-led proposal for airport rail, but not authorised to publicly discuss it, said the route would have loosely followed the Maribyrnong route for the MARL and included a stop beneath Highpoint shopping centre and the new suburb.
“It would have cost the government nothing, it would have been done well and truly, and it would have been a bespoke, modern, dedicated, beautiful solution,” one source said.
“They wanted something different and that was all.”
A second source said the sticking point was the Andrews’ government’s insistence that the airport rail link needed to follow the alternative Sunshine route to provide easier access for people travelling from Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.
“I could understand their logic to want to use Sunshine as a transport hub,” they said. “The trouble is it is no faster than the SkyBus.”
The government’s current plan for the MARL, which would run on designated tracks from the airport to Sunshine and access the city through the Metro Tunnel, promises travel times of 29 minutes from Melbourne Airport to Town Hall station.
Respected rail experts, such as Rail Futures Institute and former V/Line executive John Hearsch, fear the project as designed would stymie a long-standing promise to provide greater frequency of commuter services to and from Melbourne’s western suburbs. “The basic laws of physics just don’t stand up,” he said on Monday.
Three years after the MTM-backed plan was rejected by the government, a second consortium involving its parent company, Metro Trains Australia; IFM Investors; Melbourne Airport; and Southern Cross Station publicly launched a separate market-led proposal to build and operate the airport link along the government’s preferred Sunshine route.
Under the proposal, dubbed AirRail Melbourne, IFM investors – owned by Australia’s largest industry super funds – would have stumped up $5 billion in cash to match money already pledged for the project by the state and federal governments.
The project would have bored twin tunnels between Southern Cross and West Footscray station. This would have cut travel times from the city to the airport to 20 minutes, created more capacity for commuter trains from Melbourne’s west and also opened up the possibility of genuine, fast rail services to Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat.
The AirRail plan, like the MTM-led proposal, was for the line to provide a standalone service, with tailored trains for people travelling with suitcases, and baggage check-in at Southern Cross Station.
Had this proposal been accepted, services would already be running to the airport. The plan was considered at cabinet level but eventually rejected on the eve of the pandemic after then treasurer Tim Pallas formed a view that the tunnels would be too expensive to build.
A source with knowledge of the proposal, but unauthorised to discuss it publicly, said the consortium was flummoxed by the decision.
Hearsch believes that delays and additional costs associated with another market-led proposal, the West Gate Tunnel road project, had made the government wary of entering into another public-private partnership.
A former cabinet colleague of Daniel Andrews said the then-premier was less interested in airport rail than championing the case for another major project, the Suburban Rail Loop.
Planning experts and engineers who advised on the MARL project have made submissions to the Big Build royal commission, which the authors provided to The Age, questioning the integrity of the planning process and the politicisation of major projects in Victoria, including an alleged political bias towards the Sunshine route.
State Opposition Leader Jess Wilson on Monday urged the commission to fully investigate allegations that former premier Jacinta Allan coerced a senior public servant to back her government’s preferred route for the project.
Allan has denied the allegation. She is expected to be called as a witness by the royal commission.
Wilson said that if a Coalition government is elected, the airport rail would continue as designed. “The route is the route,” she said.
Carroll has declined to answer questions from The Age about the allegations before the royal commission, saying he had personally established the inquiry with broad terms of reference and would not pre-empt its work.
The decision to run the airport line through Sunshine – a concept strongly supported by Allan when she was the responsible minister – has created a Gordian knot of metro, regional, freight and airport services which, according to government estimates, would cost $4.1 billion to untangle.
There is no published business case for the proposed works to build a “Sunshine Superhub”. The business case for the MARL has a provisional cost of $11.5 billion, unchanged since 2021 before construction costs were boosted by five years of labour shortages, supply chain disruptions for materials and persisting high inflation.
The state and federal governments have so far pledged $12 million for the MARL.
In October 2018, in the lead-up to that year’s state election, Andrews promised to electrify passenger services to Melton and Wyndham Vale and provide “additional tracks between Sunshine and the CBD to run extra services, most likely through a new rail tunnel which would also be utilised by airport-bound trains”.
References to a new rail tunnel were deleted from published government material shortly before the AirRail proposal was rejected.
The MARL business case instead assumes its trains will run through the Metro Tunnel but makes no provision for the extra passenger services from Melton and Wyndham Vale, once they are electrified, that will also need to use the tunnel. The Melbourne Metro, according to its own business case, will reach capacity in 2031 without any airport trains.
An experienced railway project and operations manager has told the Big Build royal commission in a confidential submission that the proposed works at Sunshine would not increase the capacity of the rail system from the western suburbs into the city, which is limited between West Footscray and the CBD to two regional and two metropolitan tracks.
He believes that to make room for the MARL, the government will eventually have to build a tunnel from Sunshine to the city at an additional, exorbitant cost to the project.
Meanwhile, the MARL looms as an impediment to improved commuter services to some of the fastest growing areas in Melbourne. “It is taking capacity away from transport hungry western suburbs,” the railway project manager said.
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Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.From our partners
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