It takes 11 hours to ride the train from Sydney to Melbourne and vice versa. Eleven hours from Central Station to Southern Cross, or the other way around. Take into account the commute to the city and out again – which, if you’re relying on strike-prone Sydney trains could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours – and you’re looking at 12 to 13 hours of travel all up.
If you were to fly that same route, you would spend 1.5 hours in a plane, maybe an hour each side to get to and from the airport, and an hour at the airport before your flight – 4.5 hours, assuming no delays.
The XPT takes 11 hours to get from Sydney to Melbourne. Credit: iStock It’s a big difference. Yet plenty of Australian travellers are opting for the longer journey.
Transport NSW, which operates the twice-daily XPT service between Sydney and Melbourne, has had to add extra carriages to its interstate trains, and tickets are selling out. Year-on-year patronage of the XPT was up 14 per cent in the 2023-24 financial year , and in July to December last year, there was another big jump. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the attraction is.
Sydney to Melbourne is the world’s fifth-busiest flight route, with more than 9 million airline passengers a year (just behind Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City), but it also remains in the grip of the Qantas-Virgin duopoly, with prices that fluctuate wildly with demand. The train, meanwhile, has a set price of $83 each way, or $117 during peak holiday.
