The Hunter region has been waiting more than a decade for this. On Wednesday morning, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns will stand before the state Labor Conference at Sydney’s Town Hall and pledge to bring train manufacturing back. The price tag: $12 billion, spread over 15 years.
The location: either Teralba or Broadmeadow, both in the Hunter. The audience that cares most?
The 780 workers who would build the trains, and the 550 more who would keep them running after that. Those numbers are the government’s own. The jobs are not hypothetical.
The plan calls for a factory at one of two sites with existing rail infrastructure and industrial land. Broadmeadow is where the last train rolled off the line in 2012 before work was outsourced to China, Spain and South Korea.
Minns is expected to remind the party faithful of that exact date. “For generations, highly skilled Australian workers made our Tangaras, our red rattlers, our V Set, our S Set,” he is anticipated to say. “All until 2012.” The Tangaras themselves are the reason this is happening now.
First introduced in the late 1980s, they are nearing the end of their operational life. The government had already committed to start procuring replacements by early 2027, with a 50 percent local content target. This announcement locks a manufacturing facility into that timeline.
The question nobody has answered yet: where is the $12 billion coming from? No money was set aside in this year’s budget.
Officials say the spending would be spread over 15 years, but the funding source remains unclear. For the Hunter, the pledge is not just about trains. The region has a long industrial history tied to rail and heavy engineering.
When the Broadmeadow factory closed in 2012, it was not just a plant that shut. A skills base scattered.
Apprenticeships dried up. A generation of welders, fitters and electrical engineers found work elsewhere or left the trade entirely. The premier’s announcement is a deliberate effort to restore that capability.
The question for local workers is whether the skills can be rebuilt fast enough. The government estimates 550 ongoing roles after the manufacturing stage. That is not a small number for a region that has spent years watching heavy industry shrink.
But the jobs are contingent on the factory being built, the funding being found, and the Tangara replacements actually rolling out on schedule. The government has set a 2027 start date for procurement.
That gives roughly four years to settle the site, secure the money, build the facility and train the workforce. Teralba and Broadmeadow are the two options. Both have rail connections and industrial land already zoned for heavy use.
Broadmeadow has the historical weight — it is where the last train was built. Teralba is smaller but has its own rail infrastructure.
The choice will shape which local suburbs see the construction traffic and the jobs first. Minns is making this announcement to the Labor Party’s rank-and-file. That is a political audience, but the consequences are not political games.
The Hunter has been promised big manufacturing projects before. Some delivered. Some did not.
This one has a $12 billion figure attached, a 15-year timeline, and a fleet of aging Tangaras that cannot run forever. The workers in the Hunter will be watching to see if the money appears and the factory gets built.
They have been waiting since 2012.
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