As Melbourne is ready to complete their Metro Tunnel (Footscray-Hawksburn) this year, people have been anticipating the plans for a second Metro Tunnel that travels east-west (Newport West-Clifton Hill).
If Melbourne can envision building a second-metro tunnel, what if Brisbane devises a proposal for a 2nd CRR through the city. A possible alignment for the 2nd Cross River Rail is marked in green in the map below (OpenRailwayMap).
The 2nd CRR will serve the suburbs of St Lucia, West End, and Kelvin Grove, with connections at South Brisbane and Roma St stations, and continues out to NWTC. Furthermore, the tunnel could be used by Gold Coast-Sunshine Coast trains, diverting traffic from the 3-track corridor from Yeerongpilly to Dutton Park. All-stop Beaudesert and Beenleigh trains can use the freed up capacity on the 3-track corridor.
I know this proposal won’t come to fruition within the next century, but it is something to provide capacity for the Beaudesert trains on the Yeerongpilly-Dutton Park corridor.
While I know there won’t be any desire from political parties of all sides to commit to this, I really like the idea!
I also wonder if another option for the northern part would be to run a route like this - a CBD station at Anzac Square which would allow interchange with current Central station? Then could run up through approximately the Lutwyche/Gympie Road corridors and connect with the current north coast line at Carseldine.
It would provide a real trunk service for the north side and allow buses to focus on mostly cross town routes. I know it’s likely foam and there might be a couple of engineering issues with existing road and rail tunnels, but I could see potential with it.
I don’t really feel like Gympie Rd is an appropriate alignment for a new rail corridor. I feel more comfortable with it being a busway for Betro.
If a rail corridor is to be built along Gympie Road, the whole corridor would have to either be entirely tunneled or elevated, which will probably cost a lot of money in addition to the tunnel to Yeerongpilly to Roma St via St Lucia. Transforming Gympie Road into a busway would probably only require a bit of curb work in the middle of the road.
Furthermore, NWTC is an already well-preserved above-ground corridor; CRR2 could probably be a good origin point of NWTC.
I think you’ll find that the next new cross-river tunnel we’ll need isn’t for the South so much as the West. See the Inner City Rail Capacity Study from the mid-2000s, or the Minerva Plan. It’s sometimes referred to as the Clevewich line on here.
In the West, today we run about 17tph in AM peak (give or take a tph) out of 20tph available. With the vast growth around Ripley and also further west there’s plenty of demand yet to grow, as well as from more infill closer to the city. We should go to 24tph with signal upgrades, but still. Short term, CRR1 taking traffic off the Merivale opens up the possibility of e.g. Corinda starters sharing platforms with Cleveland trains but long term another track pair is needed.
We already have four tracks Milton to Corinda so we probably want to start the tunnel at ~Milton. Since the tunnel enters the city from the west, the logical place for it to go is east. This lets us serve New Farm and Hawthorne along the way before joining the Cleveland line somewhere near Cannon Hill. (Optionally, add a new branch SE to Capalaba.)
I don’t have strong opinions as to how the western lines split the tunnel and the surface; given Ripley’s pretty far out maybe the Springfield-Ripley branch goes full time express with all-stoppers to ~Redbank. This might require modifications to the junction layout though.
Why not the Northside? Well, the capacity upgrade the Northside needs isn’t a new cross river tunnel per se, but rather NWTC, Chermside, or else an in-place amplification along the existing corridor (6 tracks to EJ and 4 tracks to Petrie). It already has three sectors, it’s just that the boundaries are in the wrong spot; 2/3rds of a sector’s capacity used only by Ferny Grove post-CRR1.
With this amplification, we’d run FG/Airport/Doomben on the subs, Shorncliffe and Redcliffe on the mains, Caboolture and Sunshine Coast via CRR.
The Clevewich line means even less traffic on the Merivale bridge, just Morningside, Norman Park & Coorparoo really. As Southside demand grows with population and the Beaudesert line, it becomes very obvious that some Southside trains should start taking the Merivale Bridge again.
This requires quad-tracking to the sector boundary (or to Kuraby given LGCFR). Regrettably this necessitates another corridor rebuild along the Beenleigh line. I’d suggest picking a layout and sticking with it: centre express tracks to match the CRR portal, then with 2 side platforms given width constraints.
That leaves Gold Coast and Beaudesert via CRR, Beenleigh and Cannon Hill via the Merivale bridge. Salisbury should have a full flying junction of course.
I think this has a lot of merit. I had thought something under Alderley, Kelvin Grove, Exhibition, New Farm/Coorparoo, Nathan, Coopers Plains, etc but that is getting up near Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop tunnel distances for a longer distance through route it doesn’t integrate well with other routes
. So this below make a lot of sense.
Still think Subway from Indooroopilly (or beyond) to Northshore also makes sense.
The 2nd CRR tunnel I proposed is purely on the basis of fixing up problems in place with the current CRR, with its southern portal at Yeerongpilly and allowing provision for NWTC.
Since the NWTC and CRR2 line will probably have larger station spacing a higher top speed than the NCL (around 140kph), it would probably be faster for Gold Coast ↔ Sunshine Coast trains to travel through that route. With the express services now diverted into CRR2, the potentially all-stop Beaudesert ↔ Caboolture and Beenleigh ↔ Kippa Ring trains will have the 3-track Yeerongpilly-Boggo Road corridor, CRR1, and NCL to itself. This will allow for a substantial the increase in service without having to worry about ‘headbutting’ each other due to similar stopping patterns.
With that, all that’s left is to add an additional track between Yeerongpilly and Salisbury, and Petrie and Caboolture to allow for separation of Beudesert/Beenleigh ↔ Caboolture/Redcliffe services (two additional tracks if SC trains need all-day express running from Caboolture to Strathpine, stopping only at Petrie, one track for peak-hour express running).
Ah gotcha. Yeah this is firmly in the Regional Fast Rail box for me.
If we’re doing a proper fast service for the Gold Coast and we’re digging a new tunnel through the CBD for it, I’d say dream bigger, use the M3 corridor.
Don’t go through Salisbury, it’s too far west and it ties you down to the slowest parts of the Beenleigh line around Altandi. If it weren’t for my conviction that the Beaudesert line should use CRR and not Merivale I’d support an M3 corridor into CRR tunnel too.
If they are committed into building LGCFR, I highly doubt that they plan to do a Perth on the M3 for the Gold Coast line, since there is no preserved corridor in the middle of the M3.
Brisbane’s M3 does not have widened median divider to preserve space for a Perth-style railway line. It also gets a bit steep for a rail line for higher-speed rail travel at around Mt Gravatt.
Furthermore, the stop at Altandi does allow for a half-decent connection with the 140BUZ; 140BUZ passengers could transfer to the Beenleigh/Gold Coast lines. Having the GC line do a Perth on the M3 would probably just replicate the SE Busway. Salisbury would also be another key junction where Beaudesert passengers can transfer onto the GC train.
At the end of the day, the main goal of this proposal CRR is to make CRR less half-baked; allowing GC trains to bypass the Yeerongpilly-Boggo Road corridor and incorporate NWTC to Strathpine and SC as well.
(Edit: I am also not a big fan of having railway lines go in the middle of motorways. But I’m being a bit subjective here.)
I should’ve routed it to Albert St as well so students could access QUT Garden Point as well. Having a train line that conveniently serving the two major universities (as well as both QUT campuses), enabling GC & SC commuters to easily access both universities.
Having multiple PT modes serve universities will also be another big perk with the alignment of CRR2. UQ and QUT Kelvin Grove are only really accessible by bus (albeit by decent busways and bus stations, QUT Garden Point has Goodwill Bridge to South Bank, but Albert St would be a quicker walk away). But with CRR2 in place, students of UQ and QUT (especially Kelvin Grove) would have more PT mode options to use.
If we need another cbd crossing itll have to be very fast rail, not for suburban use as they can intergrate into bruce alternative, northwest corridor and w/e for south just to avoud dealing with congestion ard Brisbane with on northside only at roma St (main hub), and interchanges at Bald hills & beerwah b4 join main north line…
There is absolutely no doubt that the Subway is a higher priority than the CRR2 but when (maybe if knowing QLD Transport Planning) they come to do NWTC and Beaudesert line then I think the 2nd CRR comes into play.
Alex mentioned that another CRR2 could go from Milton to Cannon Hill via New Farm. I wonder how much this differs to the Brisbane Subway proposal? It is an underground east-west railway line after all.
