Good news just slipped out

Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University has detected some good light rail news. Here is his report!

The WAtoday article this morning ‘Could light rail fill the gaps in Metronet’s ‘circle line’?’, did indeed make my ‘year’, as reported in the story, not just ‘my day’. They were exactly my first words to the call I received from Hamish Hastie the journalist, who told me what the Premier had slipped out in his questions at a Property Council breakfast.

Why was I so pleased? Because that is how virtually every part of the Perth rail revival has happened over the past 40 years. So it may a big clue as to whether it is possibly going to happen.

Perth had a dying rail system when my family moved to Fremantle in 1975. The first steps in revival began not much later when the Court Government announced it would close the Fremantle railway and their plans showed no future for any rail.

The Friends of the Railway was a Fremantle activist venture that won over the public between 1979 and 1983 to re-open the closed Fremantle Line. At that point we set out a vision for how the whole city could be linked by heavy rail corridors and light rail connections.

At each stage the Premier of the day had to intervene to make any rail happen as the public service could only see a need for buses and cars. The interventions were all very successful, as each project was rolled out, through very clever and dedicated public servants.

The new rail service is as good as anywhere, and have made Perth grow to love our trains. We now have seven new heavy rail lines and only one piece of Metronet left: the Circle Route from Cockburn Central to Fremantle along the freight line. There are no light rail connections though.

Both can happen as part of a new Metronet 2.0.

The Circle Route will be very important to bring all those suburbs to our south into a strong link to our CBD services, to get to South Beach without a car, and to even get the train to the Dockers training ground. And there are obvious housing opportunities around stations also.

The Circle Route will need to work in with freight services before the new port is built, and that is relatively easy with modern digital signals technology. But it will need a doubling of the track between South Beach and Fremantle. There is room for this.

The astonishing words that slipped out from the Premier were ‘trackless trams’ which are what we have been calling light rail. Across Australia local governments have been calling out for trackless trams after seeing what they are like. They are much cheaper to build into our cities as they can simply run along main roads like South Street. The new Brisbane Metro ‘trams’ are three carriages, Swedish, electric, trackless trams. And they are very popular.

We need to dust off the South Street studies that Fremantle and Melville did together and get them into a serious proposal. It’s time Josh Wilson MP and Simone McGurk MLA helped put both of these Fremantle projects firmly on the political agenda at all three levels of government.

The Premier lets it slip that we may need the Circle Route and Trackless Trams linking Metronet at a Property Council breakfast. Article in WAtoday February 10^th2026.

The last train to Freo in 1979 with The Friends of the Railway established to bring it back and present a new vision for rail and trams across the city. In 1983 they won the first step.

The Southern Rail which showed the world you can build a railway deep into car-based urban sprawl and it will work. The system carries the equivalent of 8 lanes of traffic at peak time. There are now 7 new rail lines like this.

A Trackless Tram along a Main Road that can help join up the Metronet trains along corridors. Is this the next phase along with a Circle Line completion into Fremantle.

By Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University and Fremantle resident.

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