Diverging at Dulwich Hill, it headed north beneath the Main Suburban line at Lewisham to Lilyfield before heading east to Rozelle and Pyrmont, and then south under Railway Square through NSW's oldest tunnel[2][3] to join the Main Suburban line outside Central.

The line had connections to allow suburban passenger services to operate on it including accessing the Canterbury Park Racecourse sidings on race days but these were out of use by the mid-1980s and have since been removed.

[8] Initial traffic was spoil for the construction of the Main Suburban Line between Sydney and Parramatta, then for the carriage of departmental coke for steam engines, and a small amount of timber from 1860.

Initial reports of the traffic on the line suggested that freight revenue amounted to only £20 a year, and there was only 60 tonnes of coke carriage a week.

charge per person, each way on the nearby Pyrmont Bridge (at that time privately owned) was a turnoff to traders looking to use the railway for the transport of their goods.

Other factors combined to offset these problems: a plan to convey goods by horse tram to Circular Quay turned out to be a failure; traffic in hay, straw and chaff was transferred to the Darling Harbour yards in 1878; and by 1881, the main goods terminal in Sydney had become overcrowded, leading to directions that traffic for Sydney was to be directed to Darling Harbour.

[8] It was decided to construct separate goods lines from Sefton to Darling Harbour via Enfield, Dulwich Hill and Rozelle, with extensions to Botany and the State Abattoirs at Homebush Bay.

Eventually, the sole traffic was a service to deliver cereals to Mungo Scott's flour mill at Summer Hill.

In 2010, the NSW Government announced the Inner West Light Rail would be extended along the disused section from Lilyfield to Dulwich Hill.

[22] In August 2004, the Australian Rail Track Corporation and RailCorp entered into an agreement for the ARTC to lease the Metropolitan Freight Network,[23] specified as being the dedicated freight lines within the rail corridors: In August 2012, RailCorp leased the Metropolitan Goods line from Port Botany to Enfield to the ARTC for 50 years.

[26][27] The loop between North Strathfield and Rhodes has been duplicated with an underpass as part of the Northern Sydney Freight Corridor works.