Cross River Rail is in testing — and the certification phase alone takes two years

Cross River Rail has moved into testing and commissioning. At Woolloongabba, station lighting testing has begun and escalator testing continues. At Dutton Park, architectural finishes and fit-out are progressing at platform level while escalators and passenger information displays are tested. The Kent Street entrance under Annerley Road opened to the public on 27 January 2026.

The project is now expected to open in 2029.

A visible milestone landed in late August 2026: the central strip of Albert Street reopened as a pedestrian boulevard after roughly seven years closed for station construction. Surface reinstatement is the part of a station box the public actually experiences, and it usually arrives years after the structural work is done — which is the argument this article is making.

The gap between "construction finished" and "trains running" is the part of this project least understood outside the rail industry — and it is measured in years, not months.

The two-year certification phase

On construction completion, the tunnel must be independently certified by the National Rail Safety Regulator, and that testing and commissioning phase takes at least two years.

This is not a delay. It is how new heavy rail infrastructure is brought into service, and it explains a 2029 opening on a project whose civil works are substantially done.

For contractors it has a specific consequence worth planning around: the tail of a rail project is long, and it is a different kind of work. Fitout, systems integration, testing support and defect rectification run for years after the tunnelling crews demobilise, employing far fewer people but requiring specialist ones. Anyone resourcing against "construction complete" as an end date on a rail job has the wrong date.

The essentials

The cost, and what actually moved

Estimates now sit at $17-19 billion, with the Queensland Government confirming $19 billion in October 2025.

The component that moved most is specific: the cost of building and maintaining the tunnel rose from $5.4 billion to more than $10.5 billion.

That is a useful figure, because it locates the escalation rather than leaving it as a headline. The tunnel, stations and development package — held under a public private partnership including long-term maintenance — roughly doubled.

Read these as cost increases, not overruns. The December 2024 revision arrived shortly after a change of government, and restating an inherited figure is a different event from a cost rising. No decomposition into scope, escalation and delivery variance has been published — which is the case for every major Australian project.

Who is building it

CPB Contractors and UGL appear in both the PPP and the alliance — a concentration worth knowing about if you subcontract to either, because the commercial behaviour of the same firm differs markedly between an alliance, which shares pain and gain, and a PPP, which transfers risk.

What to watch

1. ETCS testing and commissioning. New signalling is historically the most schedule-sensitive element of any rail project, and it sits on the critical path to 2029.
2. Whether $19 billion holds through the testing phase.
3. Progressive station handovers. Rocklea Station reopened in July 2024, so parts of the project are already delivered — opening is staged, not a single event.
4. The three Gold Coast stations, with Pimpama confirmed as the first location.
5. Interaction with Brisbane 2032. A 2029 opening lands three years before the Games, into a Queensland labour market carrying a projected shortfall of 18,200 workers a year.

Published 1 September 2026 · Updated 7 September 2026