A number of additions and adjustments have been made to services on Sydney Trains’ Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra, South Coast and Blue Mountains lines, aimed at improving capacity and travel times for long-distance commuters.
NSW transport and infrastructure minister Andrew Constance on September 22 announced a number of timetable improvements, which he said will boost capacity and cut travel times for some longer distance customers.
From Monday, October 17, three additional ‘all stops’ trains will run between Bondi Junction and Hurstville on the Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra line, between 3:15pm and 3:45pm.
The new services will allow four existing Cronulla- and Waterfall-bound services to stop at fewer stations, resolving existing crowding on these services, and reducing travel times for some customers by as much as eight minutes, Constance said.
Transport for NSW also believes the additional services will also reduce crowding currently experienced on the South Coast line, where four express services stopping at Austinmer Station will also be permanently introduced into the timetable, after a recent review.
On the Blue Mountains line, the 3:18pm service from Central to Lithgow will be doubled from four cars to eight.
“Patronage on our rail network continues to grow and while we get on with delivering major infrastructure projects like Sydney Metro as well as building new suburban trains, we have to look at other ways we can use our existing network more effectively,” Constance said.
“Travel patterns are changing.
“There are now more day trippers, school children and those working flexible hours who want to leave the city earlier so a big part of these improvements are to cater for the changing needs of customers.
“We will continue to monitor the network to identify where we can deliver further improvements to current services.”
It is interesting to note, that after cutting the number of all-stops trains between Central and Hurstville on the last timetable update, despite public protests, the government announces a partial restoration of services, and now hopes to fix the problem of its own making. With 4 tracks available for most of this section, surely tinkering around the edges will at best be a stopgap improvement, rather than a long term staged plan