Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel will open in December this year, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has revealed.<\/p>\n
The project has been plagued by delays and cost blowouts since it was announced in 2015.<\/p>\n
The government announced earlier this week that all five Metro Tunnel stations were now complete, after construction finished on the Town Hall and State Library stations in the CBD.<\/p>\n
In a post on social media platform X, Ms Allan said the tunnel would open later this year.<\/p>\n
“EXCLUSIVE: Metro Tunnel is opening in early December,” Ms Allan said.<\/p>\n
The premier told ABC Radio Melbourne on Tuesday morning: “It’s tremendously exciting to be getting so close to the opening of the Metro Tunnel.”<\/p>\n
Ms Allan would not give a precise date for the opening of the tunnel, only repeating it would be in “early December”.<\/p>\n
“There’s some further finalisation of the appropriate accreditation processes,” she said.<\/p>\n
More details are expected to be revealed later today.<\/p>\n
In June, the government was forced to deny reports the tunnel would not be fully operational when it opened.<\/p>\n
It was reported that some train services would run through the nine-kilometre twin tunnels this year but peak-hour services would divert to the City Loop until early 2026, despite the project being spruiked as opening this year.<\/p>\n
It was suggested the delay was due to construction of two of the project’s five underground stations \u2014 Town Hall and State Library \u2014 failing to meet completion deadlines.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The State Library station was among the final two new stations to be completed. (Supplied: Victoria government)<\/p>\n
This week, the government said the stations were now complete.<\/p>\n
“It’s no coincidence that the 2 city stations were the last to be completed. The CBD location, along with their depth always meant a longer and more complex build compared to Arden, Parkville and Anzac stations,” the government wrote on its Big Build website.<\/p>\n
Metro Rail has notched up hundreds of millions of dollars in cost blowouts and there were already known issues with station construction<\/a>, including a shortage of construction workers, supply chain constraints and disruptions caused by COVID-19, that had pushed back the opening date<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel will open in December this year, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan has revealed. The project has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,16287,122513,44],"class_list":["post-194106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-jacinta-allan","tag-metro-tunnel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}