It is 60 years since Sydney’s Circular Quay rail station opened, driving the final nail into the coffin of its original 2nd harbour rail crossing. There is no evidence of any public awareness at the start of 1956 about the fateful consequences of what was instead celebrated as the belated completion of the city circle […]

It is 60 years since Sydney’s Circular Quay rail station opened, driving the final nail into the coffin of its original 2nd harbour rail crossing.

There is no evidence of any public awareness at the start of 1956 about the fateful consequences of what was instead celebrated as the belated completion of the city circle electric railway planned by JJ Bradfield, the chief engineer for the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the city’s metropolitan public transport plans.

Bradfield oversaw and strongly influenced a bridge that had four rail lines, the two on the western side that to this day carry the north shore line trains that pass through the Wynyard and Town Hall underground stations, and two on the eastern side.

Those eastern rail lines were used by trams between 1932 and early 1958, on services that linked with trains at Chatswood, North Sydney and Wynyard station, where underground platforms 1 and 2 were used for services that also went to the Taronga Park zoo.

There was also a tram stop above The Rocks, just past where they emerged from the eastern set of Wynyard tunnels and where its access steps today lead the curious up from Argyle Street to the harbour bridge footpath.

Bradfield’s vision saw these tram lines reverting to train usage as the city grew, to become the Manly-Warringah rail line, for which an initial section of tunnel can be seen peeling off the north shore line at the North Sydney rail station to this day.

But the decision to incorporate an elevated roadway above the Circular Quay station doomed the second harbour rail crossing on the eastern side of the bridge, as those tracks were replaced in March 1958 by the road lanes that became the Cahill Expressway, running across the bridge and then over the new station to ramps leading to Macquarie Street and, eventually, into William Street and the Kings Cross underpass.

Just imagine what use they might have been put to had there been a coherent Bradfield style plan for Sydney transport in the 40s and 50s. Even if the Manly-Warringah rail line hadn’t been built, Sydney would have had a paid for doubling of the rail capacity of the harbour bridge with many potential uses, including a northwest rail line, or a far more effective north shore line.

New central Sydney underground stations could have been built without the sub surface complications for the currently planned new second second harbour crossing caused by later high rise buildings and their basements, and the cross harbour road tunnel would probably have been rendered in eight lanes not four, making for better road access to and beyond the CBD.

Commuters from Newcastle and the central coast could have trains direct to North Sydney and the city underground instead of via Epping and Strathfield. A lot of things could have been done better and for less money than is planned, but not yet done, by current projects.

And the ugliness of the Cahill Expressway blocking off the harbour at Circular Quay would have been avoided, making the The Rocks and Opera House precincts that define either side of it even more attractive than they are today.

The population of greater Sydney is estimated to have reached one million in 1925, seven years before the bridge opened. In the 1954 census, two years before the Circular Quay station opened, it had reached 1.86 million and passed two million in 1962.

In the 2011 census the Sydney sprawl that is manifestly underserved by its roads and public transport networks reached a population of 4.627 million and by 2053 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates it will reach 7.9 million people.

Yet the new second second harbour rail crossing is being deliberately built too small to take the largest suburban trains in service today, and to make most passengers, in an aging population, stand up for what will be among the longest rail commutes in the Sydney basin.

This cruel and expensive stupidity is a reminder of what happens when idiots are turned loose in transport planning without supervision by anyone with an awareness of the consequences of population growth, or a comprehensive and inclusive vision of the future.

A future in which the population is much older on average, and the need to understand the difference between utility and per unit efficiency in moving people is going to be of critical importance.

Today’s 60th anniversary of the Circular Quay station should be more about learning than celebrating.

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