For those unaware, Sydney is currently embarking on some radical changes to its public transport network, one of which being extending the Sydney Metro North-West line from Chatswood to Sydenham, via a new underground railway corridor and some new stations and upgrades to existing stations. One of these new stations is named Barangaroo, and is located in – shockingly – Barangaroo. The station is already had much of its construction work done, and is scheduled to be open for services in early 2024.
Yesterday, the station was open for visiting, to give railway enthusiasts – like myself, a sneak peek into the future of Sydney Metro. A friend and I snagged some free tickets and had a look for ourselves, and I have to say, I am really impressed.
The station is located just south of Barangaroo Reserve, and is quite a significant walk from the Barangaroo ferry wharves and Wynyard Walk1. The station’s land is also surrounded by… not much, although I assume development in the area will come in the future, and I can understand not being able to place the station more southerly as it already has quite a lot of development. The fact it’s not near the wharves is a little disappointing though.
Due to Sydney Train’s Sector 2 lines2 being in absolute shambles on the day of the tour owing to trackwork, travelling to the city took about twice as long as expected, even after I left home a lot earlier than I would have. Nevertheless, we got there a bit earlier than we were scheduled to be, and we checked in and began to explore.
The station entrance was not as grandiose as some other stations I’ve seen, such as at Edmondson Park or the ECRL stations, but it was still pleasing.
The wall decorations were astounding though. From what the staff said, the bricks are made from sandstone sourced from NSW, and the walls were constructed over the course of a year. Very impressive. The leaves on the walls are also a nice touch, and definitely adds to the aesthetic. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of these kinds of decorative stonework.
While I’m here, I’d also like to apologise for some of the shoddy camera angles; I was taking a lot of video footage there, and most of the photos you’re seeing here are stills from said footage. I swear I’m a good photographer.
The space in these stations are also Massive – something that’s certainly a key vision of Sydney Metro’s plans for modern rapid transit. I’ve always like the spaciousness of the existing Metro stations, and even some newer Sydney Trains stations such as those on the South-West Rail Link. For the CBD, this spaciousness is a massive breath of fresh air (somewhat literally), compared to Town Hall – seriously, I’ve heard of complaints about Wynyard being stuffy (and to be fair they have a point) but honestly Town Hall takes the claustrophobic cake for me.
The platforms are very modern and stylish. I don’t have too much to say about them, to be honest – they’ve got full height screen doors, and passenger information screens brighter and less faulty than some other stations on the Metro (cough Epping Platform 5 cough). It definitely gives me Singapore MRT vibes, specifically Changi Airport MRT vibes.
One thing I do think would be benefitial is to have coloured tinted glass sides on the escalators to indicate direction. I assume that they’re either already planning on doing that, or maybe they want to allow the direction of the escalators to dynamically change based on traffic, and so the fixed colours would not make sense in that case.
On the topic of displays, as this was a preliminary tour, you get to see a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. For example, while all the PID screens are indeed installed and turned on, most of them seem to be running in some default state, while only two of them seem to have Sydney Metro branding, although obviously not showing any running services.
The PIDs run on some software named Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS8) – I assume 8 is the version number. From some quick Googling, it would appear that this system is vastly more common in, and developed mainly for, airports, and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of it being used in other settings. It is entirely possible that the airport APIS and the Metro APIS are unrelated, and in this case it might be a secret proprietary system that just happens to share the same name.
We also found many empty frames where we assume that the updated network maps will go. The empty frames also showed some juicy instructions on how to actually open up the frame and install a map, although I wouldn’t recommend sneakily breaking into these things when staff and other bystanders are around.
At the conclusion of our self-guided tour, we got some tote bags with some really nice swag, including stickers, pens, and a DIY paper model of the Alstom Metropolis front car – which honestly was the cherry on top.
Overall, I really liked Barangaroo station. I love how spacious, modern, and generally pleasing it is to wait for a train here, and I think it would be a fantastic addition to this fresh part of the Sydney CBD.
I took some more photos in Barangaroo on the day of my visit: Skysegment and Gold Rays.