Olympic Park railway station


 * This article is for the heavy rail station served by Sydney Trains. For the upcoming Sydney Metro rapid transit rail station, see:Sydney Olympic Park metro station.

Olympic Park is the only railway station on the Olympic Park branch line of the Sydney Trains network. It primarily serves the sporting and leisure complex Sydney Olympic Park. The station is designed to support large crowds travelling to and from the stadiums and sportsgrounds located in the complex, as well as other major events such as the Sydney Royal Easter Show. The station and sports facilities were built for the 2000 Summer Olympics, but were retained for post-games uses.

Olympic Park Station appeared in the music video for Silverchair’s 2007 song Straight Lines, however the station signage is not seen, with the text “Young Modern Station” (a reference to the band’s 2007 album Young Modern) written on the walls instead.

Design
The design of the station by HASSELL has been critically acclaimed by many. It has won the 1998 BHP Colorbond Award for innovative use of steel architecture, and the 1998 Sir John Sulman Medal, from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.

The station is located on a single track balloon loop spur line, but the station itself has 2 tracks and 4 platform faces. Ordinarily, the centre island platform (numbered 2-3) is used for both boarding and alighting, but this changes when the station is operating in major event mode. In this mode, the centre island platform is used by alighting passengers and the two side platforms are brought into use for boarding passengers. This arrangement boosts the station's capacity by managing crowding and reducing dwell times. Platforms 1 and 4 are fitted with manually opened platform edge doors to ensure safety when there are large crowds.

Services
Normally, there are shuttle trains to Lidcombe every 10 minutes (20 minutes at night). During trackwork and special events, there are also direct services to other parts of the network (usually Central and Blacktown).