Rail Clearways Project

The Rail Clearways Program was a program of public works on Sydney's suburban railway network conceived in 2004 with the aim of easing congestion by reducing the amount of infrastructure shared by multiple services. The disparate projects at pinch points throughout the network were designed to increase capacity and improve reliability. All projects were delivered by the Transport Construction Authority until it was subsumed in November 2011 by Transport for New South Wales. Following the introduction of a new timetable in October 2013 that realised the benefit of many of the projects, the program was completed with the opening of the final upgrade in January 2014.

In the mid-2000s, the Government of New South Wales suffered heavy criticism for its perceived mishandling of the Sydney rail network, which had very poor on time performance following the January 2003 Waterfall train disaster. The safety regime introduced after this crash required drivers to stick to the speed limit, which often caused delays due to the expectations of the timetable for higher speeds. A slower, more realistic, timetable was introduced in September 2005, significantly improving on time running. The Clearways Program was intended to be the next step in improving on time performance.

The Clearways Program aimed to divide the network's fourteen metropolitan rail lines into five independent "clearways" reducing the heavily interwoven nature of the Sydney system. This was intended to isolate incidents to one part of the network so other clearways would still run as scheduled, increasing on time performance. The clearways feed the existing lines through the Central Business District.

As the Carlingford Line does not run through the CBD, it was not included in any of the clearway routes. However, a Carlingford line upgrade was still included in the program, but this was cancelled in the November 2008 Mini-Budget. The Cumberland Line is spread across Clearways 4 and 5.

The five clearways routes are:

This route did not change from the pre-clearways Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line. The projects undertaken on this route have increased capacity.

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