jl999 gaming Sydney Metro Expands, Opening to Celebrity-Level Fanfare
jl999 gaming Sydney Metro Expands, Opening to Celebrity-Level Fanfare
The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Yan Zhuang, an Australian reporter in the Seoul bureau (who is very excited about the metro).
They arrived well before dawn, some from across the city or even from other states. Hundreds of people, some with signs or handmade shirts, others with hair dyed or nails painted for the occasion, waited in line, hoping to be among the first to glimpse the new arrival in Sydney. They were joined by just about every news media outlet in the city.
When the train pulled into the station, the crowd burst into claps and cheers.
A key segment of Sydney’s new metro train line opened early on Monday with a level of fanfare usually associated with celebrity appearances or pop concerts. In a mostly car-dependent country where public transportation in major cities can be best described as “decent,” the expansion, which featured expansive, “cathedral-like” stations and spacious, driverless trains, felt momentous.
The new section, which connects Sydenham, an inner-west neighborhood of Sydney, to Chatswood, in the north, runs under the city’s business district and crosses under the Harbor Bridge. It is the second part of the metro project to open, after a northern section that started operating in 2019. Several more segments are under construction, expected to open over the next decade. They all form part of a new rail system that updates and integrates with Sydney’s existing rail network, which was mostly built between the 1850s and early 1900s, said David Levinson, a transportation professor at the University of Sydney.
The news media covered the opening in breathless terms. The national broadcaster ABC described a ride on the metro as “a bit like something from a science fiction movie.” One journalist marveled at “just how much space there is for commuters.” Broadcasting live from inside a moving train, another reporter said, “I am hanging on for dear life here.” (The trains can travel up to speeds of 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, per hour, according to the transportation agency for New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital.)
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTo be clear, the new trains are not revolutionary. They resemble, on a smaller scale, the subways of Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong. The metro was built by a consortium led by Hong Kong’s MTR rail company.
“It’s not something super amazing,” Professor Levinson said. “It’s state-of-the-art, but lots of systems are state-of-the-art.”
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