Melbourne Airport Rail Stage One: track upgrade design notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on Roads & Infrastructure (AU)
30 Second Briefing
Works on Melbourne Airport Rail Stage One are advancing, with site investigations now under way in Tottenham for the West Footscray to Albion Rail Upgrade. The first stage will untangle approximately six kilometres of existing track between West Footscray and Albion and construct two new platforms at Sunshine Station, a key junction for regional and metropolitan services. Track reconfiguration and additional platform capacity will be central to future airport rail operations planning, signalling design, and construction staging around live rail corridors.
Technical Brief
- Investigation outputs will inform constructability staging for working within narrow rail corridors and brownfield geometry.
- Lessons on brownfield rail reconfiguration will be directly applicable to other Victorian metropolitan upgrade corridors.
Our Take
The Melbourne Airport Rail works between West Footscray and Albion sit in the same Victorian Government pipeline as the Level Crossing Removal Project pieces in our database, signalling continued prioritisation of rail–road grade separation and corridor untangling across metropolitan Melbourne.
With 6 kilometres of track rationalisation feeding into Sunshine Station, this stage will likely become a key capacity and reliability enabler for later airport-bound services, similar to how completed works at Diggers Rest have unlocked smoother operations on that corridor.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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