Metro Tunnel Almost Done: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Melbourne's Metro Tunnel is weeks away from its final commissioning tests, and the voices shaping the project's legacy are getting louder. The Victorian Department of Transport and Planning confirmed this week that tunnelling and fitout works beneath Swanston Street are substantially complete, with trial passenger services expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026. The five new underground stations — including the centrepiece Town Hall Station beneath Flinders Lane — are described by project engineers as technically ready for operational handover.

The timing matters for a city where the Flinders Street Station concourse handles roughly 110,000 passengers on a peak weekday and the City Loop, opened in 1981, was never designed for the population Melbourne now carries. The Albanese government's infrastructure funding commitments and the Allan Labor government's broader Big Build agenda have kept the Metro Tunnel politically prominent, but the question shifting from "when" to "what next" is drawing out a broader set of views.

Planners and Engineers Point to the Network Effect

Transport analysts at the University of Melbourne's Transport, Health and Urban Design Research Hub have been modelling the cross-city line's impact since detailed plans were released in 2017. Their core finding, reiterated in a briefing paper circulated to the Department of Transport and Planning in June, is that the new Sunbury-to-Pakenham cross-city corridor will remove between 17,000 and 22,000 passengers from the City Loop each peak hour — a structural relief the current system simply cannot replicate through timetabling alone.

The five stations — Arden in North Melbourne, Parkville adjacent to Royal Melbourne Hospital, Town Hall, State Library on La Trobe Street, and Anzac at St Kilda Road — have each been positioned to service major employment and health precincts. Arden, particularly, sits at the centre of a $15 billion urban renewal zone the state government is pursuing with private developers, and planners have argued the station is the keystone without which that precinct simply doesn't function at scale.

The CFMEU, which has had members working the Metro Tunnel sites since 2019, has publicly backed the project's completion timeline after years of stop-start pandemic disruptions. The union's Victorian secretary has used appearances at Labor-aligned infrastructure forums to frame the tunnel as proof that large-scale public works projects can deliver union conditions and still reach milestones — a talking point with obvious relevance to broader industrial relations debates in the state.

Commuters and Local Businesses Want Specifics

On street level, the mood among businesses along Swanston Street and around Domain Road in South Yarra — near the Anzac station entrance — is a mix of relief and impatience. Construction hoardings have been a fixture in both areas for the better part of six years. The South Yarra Village traders' association has been pushing the Department of Transport and Planning for a confirmed opening date since March, arguing that without a firm date, marketing campaigns and lease decisions are being held in limbo.

The fare structure for the new line remains under discussion. Metro Tunnel services will operate within the existing Myki zone system, meaning most inner-city commuters will pay the standard daily cap of $11.00 for metropolitan travel. But transport economists have flagged that the new stations' catchment zones will require Public Transport Victoria to revisit how peak-hour capacity pricing is applied — a conversation that hasn't been publicly resolved.

For commuters on the Sunbury and Pakenham-Cranbourne lines, who will eventually board trains running directly under the CBD without changing at Flinders Street, the practical shift could be significant. Current end-to-end journeys from Sunbury to Cranbourne via the City Loop take approximately two hours and 20 minutes. Project modelling suggests the cross-city routing will cut that by around 30 minutes.

Public Transport Victoria has indicated a formal communications blitz, including real-time updates through the PTV app and printed timetable distribution at Flinders Street and Southern Cross stations, will begin eight weeks before passenger services open. Commuters wanting early information can register through the PTV website, which has carried a Metro Tunnel project page since 2021. The Department of Transport and Planning has not yet set a public launch date, but the window between now and December is narrowing fast.