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Rail passengers will have to wait until 2028 before the NSW government’s multibillion-dollar fleet of new long-distance passenger trains enters service, five years later than originally planned.
In warning that a lack of trains was hampering efforts to put on extra services, Regional Transport Minister Jenny Aitchison revealed the new Spanish-built regional fleet was now scheduled to be introduced into service in 2028, blaming the previous Coalition government for botching the project.
“They put it in a complicated public-private partnership, which we’ve bought out now so that we can actually speed up the delivery,” she said on Monday.
“They were taking 17 days on the production line in Spain. They’re now taking five days.”
The new long-distance trains were ordered by the previous Coalition government for key interstate rail lines from Sydney to Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, as well as for services to regional centres in NSW. Under the original plans, the first train was meant to enter service in January 2023.
The NSW government has previously declined requests to reveal when the new fleet will enter passenger service. So far, 11 of the 29 trains are in NSW after being shipped from Spain, and three of those are undergoing intensive testing.
The first of the new trains to carry passengers will be on the line between Sydney and Dubbo, where a maintenance facility has been built for the new fleet. They will need approval by the national rail safety regulator before they can enter service.
The cost of the fleet, which was ordered to replace the state’s decades-old XPT, Xplorer and Endeavour trains, blew out by $826 million to $2.29 billion in 2023.
The repeated delays to the new regional trains come as $100 million will be spent on upgrades to the 321-kilometre rail line between Sydney and Canberra, half of which will be funded by the Commonwealth, and the rest split between the NSW and ACT governments.
Aitchison said the lack of “additional trains on the track” was styming the government’s ability to boost services on the Sydney-Canberra line. “The capacity is limited. I’ve got people all over NSW that want an extra train but unfortunately [they] weren’t ordered properly and weren’t delivered properly by the former government,” she said.
A train trip between Sydney and Canberra takes about four hours and 15 minutes, which the NSW government hopes to cut to under four hours. In comparison, a car journey is three hours.
Years-long delays to the rollout of the Spanish-built regional fleet, as well as new intercity trains, have forced the government to keep decades-old fleets in service for longer. About $40 million has been spent on upgrading the XPT fleet, which was originally meant to be retired by 2023.
Last year the NSW auditor-general was withering in an assessment of Transport for NSW’s handling of the purchase of both the regional and intercity train fleets, the combined cost of which has blown out by more than 50 per cent on original forecasts to $6.8 billion.
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