The line then heads north-west to Town Hall, then east to Martin Place before emerging near the Art Gallery of New South Wales onto a viaduct across the suburb of Woolloomooloo.

The line goes back underground at Edgecliff, then heads south-east through tunnel to emerge at a cutting in Woollahra, the site of a vestigial station.

[2] Successive Royal Commissions in 1890 & 1896 recommended a railway be built into the city, with the provision for an Eastern Suburbs extension, but both requests were ignored.

These tunnels ran southward from St James rising to clear the City Circle lines and turned east towards the Eastern Suburbs.

However, the intervention of the Great Depression and World War II halted construction on all Bradfield's plans including the Eastern Suburbs Railway causing its abandonment.

Construction commenced in late 1951 on sites around Central and Redfern stations with preliminary railway tunnels blasted 27 metres (90 ft) below Martin Place but ceased in 1952 due to a recession.

In 1967, the New South Wales Government awarded the contract for the civil and structural design of the entire line to the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority (SMA), the Federal Government agency responsible for the design and construction of the Snowy Mountains Scheme in south-eastern Australia.

Various station options were considered including a station at Rushcutters Bay, but the final conclusion was the line would run Central (by finishing the incomplete platforms), Town Hall (making use of two hitherto unutilised platforms), Martin Place, Kings Cross, Edgecliff, Woollahra, Bondi Junction, Charing Cross, Frenchmans Road, Randwick Junction, University of New South Wales and Kingsford (Nine Ways).

Terrain factors caused the line to be composed of dual single-bore tunnels and have two significant twin track concrete viaduct structures at Woolloomooloo and Rushcutters Bay.

The intended terminus at Kingsford, where the terrain drops closer to sea level, may have been an above ground station with potential for stabling yards on then government-owned land near the suburb of Daceyville.

Further, only a single-track connection would be made to the existing Sydney network at Erskineville, with provision for double-tracking at a later stage (along with a new underground platforms at Redfern).

The final contract for the line involved approximately 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) of single track tunnel structures and crossovers, four underground stations (Martin Place, Kings Cross, Edgecliff and Bondi Junction; Town Hall already existed and Central was partially complete) and one surface station (Woollahra, in a cutting), two 772-metre (2,533 ft) concrete viaducts and a further 800 metres (2,600 ft) of surface works.

[6] When the Wran government came to power in May 1976, a Board of Review of the Legislative Assembly was set up to examine the merits and feasibility of the Eastern Suburbs Railway project.

Lastly, it was decided to build the Bondi Junction Bypass section of the Eastern Suburbs Freeway (a road otherwise unbuilt), now Syd Einfeld Drive.

When opened, the integration with the rest of the Sydney network (announced as a result of the 1976 report) had not been completed, so the line operated as a short-lived self-contained shuttle service between Central and Bondi Junction at five-minute frequencies during the day and peak.

[12] In 1999, a private proposal to extend the railway to Bondi Beach at a cost of $197 million received backing from the Federal Government but the scheme did not go ahead.