In 2012 the newly formed agency Transport for NSW released 'Sydney's Rail Future' followed by the 'NSW Long Term Transport Master Plan'. There is some great thinking in these documents, they clearly identify the value of effective transport services and the transport challenges facing Sydney. As for the rail network, the 'Sydney's Rail Future' strategy articulates a great strategy to deliver a three-tiered system; Rapid Transit, Suburban and Intercity. The argument is that these systems provide different services to different customers, a sort of market segmentation and product differentiation strategy.

Unfortunately the strategy is then hijacked by transport management, arguing for the separation of Sydney Trains and NSW Trains, and hijacked by transport planners, who argue for their pet metro rail project.

If this strategy had been considered in a more holistic context of a long term strategy, rather than a strategy for pet projects, the changes could be far simpler, easier to implement, and significant'y more far reaching. That is, with only a few small changes to the inner city rail network, the entire Sydney rail network could be separated into three tiers of service, and delivered in partnership with the private sector.

The real pinch points in the rail network that force intercity and suburban services onto the inner city lines are at Sydenham and Central. At Sydenham, the Bankstown and Southern lines merge, and at Central the Western Line and Northern/North Shore Line merge. These merges no only limit the capacity of these lines, but also complicate the separating of intercity, suburban and metro services. If these lines were extended from Sydneham and Central into the CBD, rail capacity in Sydney could be doubled. Intercity services would have express access directly to Central, and Suburban services would have separate service to the CBD. The Inner West line, Bankstown line, East Hills line and Hurstville to Bondi Junction lines could all be converted to high frequency inner city metro services.

If separated, the conversion of these lines and the new rolling stock could be delivered by private sector partners. This would allow the government to spread the funding of the infrastructure over a 25 or 30 year PPP concession period.

To realise this more effective approach to a three tired system, it is critical the central CBD corridor is reserved for suburban services. This corridor provides convenitent access from the CBD to the suburban network without the high cost of duplicating the city circle solution. It is critical the central CBD corridor is not squandered on the proposed second harbour crossing. While a second harbour crossing is indeed needed. Rather than duplicating the existing crossing as is currently proposed for the North West pet project, the future harbour crossings could break the city circle and extend the metro services to the Northern Beaches and along the Victoria Road corridor to the northwest, without the any additional tunneling through the CBD.

Taken to it's full extent, the concept is illustrated below. The new lines (double lines) separate intercity and suburban line (black lines) from high frequency metro lines (colour lines).