Metro Tunnel celebrates third station milestone 

Melbourne’s inner north and south will be closer together than ever before when the Metro Tunnel opens next year, with a train from Arden to St Kilda Rd taking less than 15 minutes.

Major construction finished at Anzac Station on St Kilda Rd last month, in another major step toward opening to passengers. 

The project will directly link the St Kilda Rd employment hub and Arden Precinct in North Melbourne, which will become home to up to 34,000 jobs and around 20,000 residents by 2051, via the new rail tunnel under the CBD.

A train trip between Arden and Anzac stations will be about 11 to 13 minutes when the project opens in 2025.

Anzac Station – the third of five new state-of-the-art underground train stations to be finished – will provide train access to some of Melbourne’s most important destinations, including the Shrine of Remembrance, the Royal Botanic Gardens and Albert Park for the first time. 

Trains on the Sunbury, Cranbourne and Pakenham lines will stop at the new stations, with passengers on every other line able to make a single change at Melbourne Central (to State Library Stations) or Flinders Street (to Town Hall Stations) to get there. 

Anzac Station has been designed as a “pavilion in the park” with its signature 85-metre-long, 21-metre-wide timber canopy’s skylights filling the station with natural light, reducing reliance on artificial lighting.

Over the past six years, thousands of workers have built the station canopy and entrances, realigned St Kilda Rd four times, created the new Anzac Station tram stop, poured concrete for the station platform and pedestrian underpass and installed 12 escalators, six lifts and Victorian-first platform screen doors.  

The tram stop, which opened in 2022, has extra-long platforms that can fit four trams at a time for large crowds attending events such as Anzac Day and the Melbourne Grand Prix.  

The stop will be Melbourne’s first direct tram/train interchange, providing a seamless connection between tram and train services, while the station takes pressure off the world’s busiest tram corridor.  

Domain Rd reopened to traffic on Monday and the Route 58 tram will continue to travel along nearby Toorak Rd. 

The Metro Tunnel will connect the busy Sunbury and Cranbourne/Pakenham lines via a new tunnel under the city, creating an end-to-end rail line from the north-west to the south-east, giving passengers new connections and more choice. •