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February 10, 2026 — 5:00am
At either end of Cheltenham station sit two giant, vacant concrete platforms that locals say are draining the life from the community.
Fenced off and ringed with dead weeds, the concrete slabs have stood empty since the level crossings at either end of the train station were removed in 2020.
“It’s ugly,” says Derek Screen, president of the Pennydale Residents Action Group. “We tried to find out from VicTrack, which owns the land, if there was any way we could have it turned into a temporary park, put down some grass, some potted trees or whatever, but were told: ‘No, it’s too dangerous.’”
On hot days, the forbidding concrete surfaces, each roughly 2000 square metres in size, radiate heat and make the precinct a hostile place, Screen says.
“If you’re on the station underneath, you can feel the heat coming down. The heat island effect from those concrete blocks is ridiculous.”
When the government began removing several level crossings along the Frankston line – including two at Cheltenham – a decade ago, Labor faced a fierce and organised community campaign against building elevated rail – or “sky rail” – anywhere along the line.
Mostly, the community got its wish. Of the 21 crossings removed on the Frankston line so far, 13 have been replaced with a trench, six with a rail bridge, and two involved a road closure.
Central Cheltenham’s lifeless public spaces are a legacy of that victory.
Long-term resident Kylie Fennessy recalls the fight against the sky rail proposal, and says while most people got what they wanted, she now views with envy the linear strip of land that has been opened up beneath the new rail bridge in Parkdale – one of the few places on the Frankston line where the railway was elevated.
“It’s great. It’s got all the parks underneath, there’s car parking, gardens, an outdoor gym. When you go past any time of the day, people are using the space,” Fennessy said.
Fennessy believes the vocal community that lobbied against elevated rail pushed the government to build something better beneath the bridges, while Cheltenham was left with lifeless public spaces.
“It just seems like there has been an effort to make the sky rail precinct workable, to have services and look nice, and that’s just not what happened in our area,” Fennessy said.
Dr John Stone co-wrote a Melbourne University-RMIT joint study 10 years ago, which analysed more than 150 years of level crossing removals in Melbourne, and concluded that elevating the rail line had brought more public benefit than other techniques, including trenches.
Subsequent work by his urban design students concluded that the Frankston and Upfield lines were the best candidates in Melbourne for elevated rail, because of the high number of closely clustered level crossings.
“When people started to test different ideas, it was nearly always the case – unless there were particular issues with geography – that rail up gave you the best outcome because it gave you a large linear corridor of new land, and it also gave a different experience for the train traveller, particularly with all those bay views that you would have got,” Stone said.
Stone, an honorary transport planning lecturer at the University of Melbourne, said “the noisy politics of the moment” won out over good planning along the Frankston line.
“The Labor Party blinked in the face of a lot of community opposition. Putting the rail in a trench in so many places along the Frankston line was a backwards step,” he said.
Last month, the state government initiated a plan to build higher-density housing on Cheltenham’s concrete platforms, rezoning them, along with one other piece of VicTrack land in Cheltenham and one further south along the line in Mentone, for apartments.
The four sites have been given preferred height limits of between six and eight storeys. A planning amendment, gazetted in January, rezoned the land “to assist with meeting state government [housing] targets for middle Melbourne”.
The zoning change was completed at the request of property developer Hallmarc, which is in the final stages of developing a 245-apartment project in neighbouring Highett.
Hallmarc declined to comment about its aspirations for the Cheltenham sites, arguing it would be inappropriate given the land is currently owned by the state.
Planning documents from 2017 indicate the government sought from the outset to create spaces above the tracks at Cheltenham for “transit-oriented development”.
It’s not the only level crossing removal on the Frankston line eyed for housing.
An even larger concrete platform was built above the rail trench at Ormond station, although it also remains undeveloped, almost 10 years after plans to build a housing tower there were first put forward.
A spokesperson for the Allan government said 367 new homes would be built on land freed up from the level crossing removal program, including a 115-apartment building completed at Gardiner station in 2023, 45 apartments under construction in Rosanna and a 97-home social housing development in Noble Park.
Kingston City Council said the concrete platforms had been earmarked for development since 2016, and that this aligned with the council’s own housing strategy.
“Being that these prominent spaces have stood vacant for an extended period, we have received regular queries from traders and residents seeking their activation.”
The council said it had written to the Level Crossing Removal Project to request their temporary activation. “That request was unfortunately declined.”
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