Michael Caton enjoys living a short walk from Sydney’s Bondi beach, but when the actor needs to venture into the heart of the city for an appointment, he knows to never schedule anything before late morning, well after peak hour.
“You wouldn’t dream of taking the bus in the morning,” the 82-year-old says on speaker phone while taking his Toyota RAV4 for a drive. “They’re all full. They just don’t really do the job.”
When it comes to telling Australians about dreams, Caton has form, of course. His character Darryl Kerrigan in theclassic film The Castlecoined the catchphrase “tell him he’s dreamin’”.
Caton also fronted a 1998 campaign byBondilocals opposed to a controversial plan to extend Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs railway line from Bondi Junction to the beach.
“It will be the end of the line for Bondi,” Caton proclaimed at protests against the privately led train extension, the ABC reported at the time. Crowds chanted back at Caton in response: “Tell ’em they’re dreamin’.”
Sydney’s expansive rail network is Australia’s busiest, but it’s almost impossible to catch a train to a beach to catch some waves. That’s despite a long history of proposals to extend lines to the city’s world-famous beaches.
Unlike Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, New York’s Coney Island and even Melbourne’s Brighton beach, residents and tourists can’t catch a train to Sydney’s globally recognised Bondi or Manly – or indeed any ocean beach in the eastern suburbs or north of the city. (Cronulla beach, 20km south of the city centre, can be reached by train, but the trip takes an hour.)
Instead,beachgoers are forced into often-crowded buses or cars, the latter being expensive and difficult to park on busy days. Roads in summer can be heavily congested.
Why Sydney’s beaches remain inaccessible is explained by how the city expanded, as well as a mid-20th-century decision described as “organised vandalism” and persistent efforts by beachside locals to limit public transport and a perceived influx of “outsiders”.
It might be hard to imagine today, but rail was once the main mode of transport to the city’s beaches.
Railways were first built in New South Wales primarily to send agricultural products from rural areas into Sydney, says Dr Geoffrey Clifton, a senior lecturer in transport and logistics management at the University of Sydney.
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Heavy rail lines were gradually extended and, as Sydney expanded, so did the train network. By the late 1800s, light rail – or trams – emerged as an alternative.
“Trams made more sense in the east of Sydney, where distances were shorter and the land was already developed,” Clifton says. But rural politicians and leaders with interests – commonly land speculation – in the comparatively underdeveloped western suburbs continued to support heavy rail.
“It was a competition between those who saw trams as the future and those who believed in trains.”
Tram lines sprang up across Sydney’s north shore and eastern suburbs, including to the beaches. Sydney developed one of the largest tram networks in the world and services were fast –in many cases speedier than the few modern lines resurrected 100 years later. The expression “shoot through like a Bondi tram” was born.
But Sydney, like much of the world, was then changed by the car.
“Firstly, after world war one, returning soldiers who’d driven trucks in the war bought themselves bus licences, and that drove suburban development away from trams and started the sprawl of Sydney,” Clifton says.
“After world war two, everyone was buying cars, patronage started to drop off, and by that stage the tram network needed serious investment and renewal.”
Instead, leaders chose to tear up Sydney’s tram network and replaced it with buses, most of which still run today. The decision was popular at a time when buses were cheaper to run and could cope with demand, but it is now seen as foolish by many transport experts. Mathew Hounsell, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, describes the destruction as“the largest organised vandalism in our nation’s history”.
In the decades since the last service on Sydney’s original tram network concluded in 1961, there have been campaigns for new train lines and extensions to beachside suburbs.
A 1970s study proposed building a heavy rail line from North Sydney station to the farthest of the northern beaches. Half a kilometre of tunnel was constructed towards Mosman, but the plan never progressed, mostly because of local opposition and challenges in acquiring land and traversing difficult terrain.
There were plans to extend rail through Sydney’s eastern suburbs – including further than the limited Bondi beach proposal that Caton objected to in the late 1990s.
The Eastern Suburbs line to Bondi Junction in the 1970s was a rare example of a rail line built to an already densified part of Sydney in the post-tram era.
During construction, about 100 metres of tunnel was built beyond Bondi Junction towards the beach. But it has since been repurposed to turn trains around.
There were also proposals for extensions to Maroubra and Malabar that failed to materialise.
The resistance to adding rail infrastructure to already settled suburbs was evident in Woollahra, where a partially constructed station on the Eastern Suburbs line was never completed. Partially built platforms remain visible but unused due to resident objections in the 1970s.
Recentcalls to finish building Woollahra stationgo to the heart of the nimby v yimby (“yes in my back yard”) tension. Generally, increased housing density has been the basis for new train lines being laid in Australia
“A lot of the problem with why these proposals go nowhere is because these suburbs are already well developed, there’s already higher density and apartments,” Clifton says. “So there’s less incentive for governments to spend the money without the potential to get an uplift in housing, a return on investment.”
The transport academic says this philosophy dictated development in Sydney well before the current Minns government’stransport-oriented development program.
“The problem for beach suburbs is that they already had the rail investment when they were growing, and while they’ve only become denser since, the tram lines have been torn up,” Clifton says.
Despite the lack of a train station at Bondi beach, people still flock there. Traffic and parking woes have intensified in the decades since locals successfully defeated the rail proposal.
Buses that have filled the void are among Sydney’s busiest. Annual ridership on the 333 “from the city to the sea” bus route, which runs as often as every three minutes, has exceeded 8 million in recent years, significantly more than some of Sydney’s heavy rail lines such as the T5.
Caton is frustrated when catching a crowded bus that has to contend with traffic snaking up the hills of Bondi towards the city – but he doesn’t regret campaigning against the train line.
“The train did absolutely nothing for the locals, sure, it was good for getting more people to Bondi, but it didn’t do anything for us,” Caton says.
His opposition was based on the proposal’s lack of additional stations to serve residents along Bondi Road or the north of the suburb. Having just one station at the beach would have led to chaos, he insists.
Caton says his anti-trains stance was not nimbyism but admits that in the years since he has rallied with fellow residents against several other proposals regarding local traffic and moves to reduce street parking.
“We are fighting all of these changes, but it’s because they’re stupid decisions; they don’t consult the people who live here.”
He says a train to the beach would make more sense elsewhere, such as at Maroubra.
For now, Sydney must make do with low-capacity buses. An articulated bus such as those that run to Bondi can hold about 110 passengers compared with an average Sydney train service that moves 1,200 people.
Buses also have a bumpier ride, are susceptible to traffic jams and aren’t always accessible for older passengers, people with young children and those with disabilities.
The lack of trains makes getting to beaches in Sydney harder but the nimby campaigns haven’t made the city’s sand exclusive.
“There are no gatekeepers,” says Louis Nowra, the author of a biography of Sydney. He notes that the bus between Bondi Junction and the beach only adds 10 minutes to the journey for people travelling from western Sydney, for example.
“If you live in Bondi, you have to put up with crowds and cars. I don’t see a train system alleviating that,” Nowra says.
Many people prefer less busy parts of Sydney, argues Nowra, who was turned off Bondi after attending a recent literary festival. “I found the crowds claustrophobic, so I think Bondi has reached saturation point without more fucking visitors.”
Asked if it’s more difficult to live in Bondi in 2025 compared with 1998, when the rail extension was proposed, Caton is frank.
“Oh God yes, but a train would have turned Bondi into Surfers Paradise.”
Given the transport-oriented development focus of the current NSW government, hopes for new rail infrastructure to the beaches are subdued.
Clifton says extending existing light rail from Randwick to Coogee beach and from Kingsford to Maroubra beach are the most plausible options.
But it would need significant support and campaigning from the local council and community, with Clifton pointing to the City of Sydney mayor Clover Moore’s continued lobbying for the George Street light rail.
“If local communities want that, they should be developing plans and … advocating to government for those extensions,” Clayton says.
The Randwick council mayor, Dylan Parker, says he would welcome government investing in such extensions. However, the council has not been actively lobbying for them.
Guardian Australia understands the incline on Coogee Bay Road has been identified as a barrier to extending the light rail to Coogee beach. While trams historically travelled that route, the gradient could be problematic for the larger rolling stock in use today.
Outside of extending light rail, future projects in Sydney are for driverless Metro trains, with the era of extending Sydney’s heavy rail network, whichhas been hamstrung by maintenance problems and union disagreements, considered over.
The NSW government is considering potential eastern extensions of the Sydney Metro West line set to open next decade. Proposals include running trains from the CBD to Green Square, the University of New South Wales and on to Maroubra and Malabar – which Randwick council supports.