The delivery of NSW's multibillion-dollar fleet of new intercity trains from South Korea is running late, which risks delaying the start of their first passenger services until the first half of next year.
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The first of the trains to roll off the assembly line had initially been expected to arrive by ship in March but they are now unlikely to be delivered until November or December.
The trains will have to undergo three to four months of testing after they arrive, which means the original plan to press them into regular passenger services on the rail line from Sydney to the Central Coast and Newcastle late this year is unlikely to be realised.
Construction of a $265 million maintenance facility for the intercity trains at Kangy Angy on the Central Coast is also running late due to factors such as multiple design changes.
While it was due to become operational this year, sources say only about a third of the facility covering 50 hectares has been completed. It will now not become operational until next year.
Transport for NSW secretary Rodd Staples said the first of the new trains would arrive late this year, and a "timeline for them to enter service would be confirmed once they arrive".
"There are a number of moving parts involved in any project of this scale and we will continue to work closely with RailConnect to get these trains on the tracks as soon as possible for our intercity customers," he said in a statement.
"Testing [in Korea] started in March 2019 and has allowed us to run the trains all day rather than be limited by short shut-down periods on the busy Sydney Trains network. This means that any fine- tuning can take place at the manufacturing facility before the train is shipped to Australia."
RailConnect is a consortium of Korea's Hyundai Rotem, Japan's Mitsubishi and Australian engineering firm UGL, which will maintain the fleet.
The Berejiklian government ordered an extra 42 carriages for the intercity fleet in February, which boosted the total order to 55 new trains and 554 double-deck carriages.
Mr Staples said the order for extra carriages had "also had an impact on the delivery schedule".
The larger order increased the cost of the government's contract with the RailConnect consortium to build and maintain the trains by $130 million to $2.43 billion. That figure does not include the cost of the maintenance facility at Kangy Angy.
The new trains will replace the four-decade-old V-set, which are scheduled to be retired by 2022. Their arrival will also free up Oscar trains to be refurbished and switched to services on Sydney's suburban network, which is experiencing record growth in demand.
Under the original timeframe, the new intercity trains were due to begin services on the Blue Mountains line to Mount Victoria by the middle of next year, followed by Lithgow about four months later.
Commuters in the Illawarra will have to wait until 2021 before the intercity trains are scheduled to be pressed into service on the rail link between Sydney and Wollongong and Kiama.
While commuters tend to favour reversible seats in carriages, the state's top transport bureaucrats opted for fixed seats for the new trains in a two-by-two formation for safety reasons, and because they were lighter, and required less maintenance.
Flip seats were also judged to be more susceptible to damage and vandalism due to their moving parts, and posed a greater fire risk because they comprised more combustible materials.
