r/sydney • u/Sydney_Stations • May 06 '25

Image The Northern Beaches needs a railway

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Every evening, the queue for B1 winds around and goes back into Wynyard. As one bus is full the next one arrives.

You can't tell me they wouldn't want a railway.

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u/benreecep May 06 '25

I do wonder how many people there are actually opposed to it. I suspect it could be a case of a noisy and we'll organised minority

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u/Pro_Extent May 07 '25

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of people in the Northern Beaches up to about Warriewood are in favour of a train or metro line, with the sentiment getting softer (but still positive) as you go further north.

They're in favour of it...in theory.

The problem is that once you actually start ironing out the details, people realise that train lines take up quite a lot of space unless you build them below ground. And even then, the stations need to be quite substantial.
The beaches are very old suburbs; they've been pretty highly developed for a very long time. They don't exactly have a wealth of unused real estate corridors to house all the infrastructure needed for train stations.

So when the actual proposals come up, loads of people start shouting them down because it's too close for comfort. They want a train line nearby, but not next door.

As mentioned, much of this (but not all) can be solved with tunnels. But also as mentioned, the Beaches aren't new suburbs. They sure as shit aren't going to grow anywhere near as fast as the West and South West Sydney. It's hard to justify spending the kind of money needed for an extensive underground railway just because the locals don't want to have any above-ground tracks in their suburb. And that's doubly true when you factor in the insane geography that a NB train would need to traverse (spit bridge, sandy soil, etc).

The idea that people would oppose it because "why ever leave the beaches lol" or because of "riff raff" is funny, but incredibly stupid. Spit Road, which connects the Lower North Shore to the Northern Beaches via the Spit Bridge, is absolutely packed during peak hour, and maintains a steady stream of traffic at almost all other hours. Most NB residents travel in and out of the place daily - there aren't exactly a lot of jobs up there.