New Wodonga station to wait for trains before opening to passengers

But passengers will continue to catch coaches from the existing station in the centre of the city until V/Line trains resume their services in the North East.

Trains will pass through the centre of Wodonga for the final time overnight tonight and Australian Rail Track Corporation spokesman Brian Dale yesterday confirmed construction of the new station in West Wodonga was likely to be finished within weeks.

“We expect the new Wodonga station to be completed by the middle to the end of August, at which point it will be handed over to V/Line,” he said.

V/Line will then complete a fit-out of the building, which is expected to take several weeks.

But the move to West Wod-onga will not occur until just before V/Line trains hit the new standard gauge track later this year.

Staff at the existing station have been inundated with inquiries this week from people expecting V/Line’s coach services to relocate to the new station after the last XPT passenger and freight trains run through the High Street level crossing tonight and early tomorrow.

V/Line spokesman Daniel Moloney said that wasn’t the case.

“The thing we really want to pass on to people is that if you’re catching those replacement coach services at the moment, then still continue to use the old Wodonga station in the centre of town,” Mr Moloney said.

“We don’t want people missing that coach connection through to Seymour.”

Mr Moloney said V/Line was prepared for its return to train travel in the North East.

“The small component of the project that V/Line’s been working on is the conversion of our trains and they’re ready to go,” he said.

“The carriages themselves have been refurbished already; we’re still running them on the existing broad gauge network, but it’s actually quite a quick process, it takes a couple of days, to switch them across to standard gauge.

“At the moment, we’re just using them on the broad gauge until we get a precise indication of when we need to go live.”

There would be a period of driver training and track familiarisation before the trains carried passengers.