Farewell Region 6 – Tempe Depot

Tempe Bus Depot is one of the four bus depots currently operated by STA in Region 6 that will be handed over to TSA on July 1st.

The site opened as a tram depot on 15 September 1912 . In 1954, the site was converted into a bus depot to service government bus services in the Southern Suburbs of Sydney. The new depot was needed to take pressure off Kingsgrove depot which was struggling with the large amount tram replacement work during the closure of the Sydney Tram Network.

After 38 years of service, the original Tempe bus depot closed in 1992 and services were reallocated to Kingsgrove and Port Botany Depots.  The site then became the Sydney Bus Museum until 2010, when the museum relocated to Leichhardt Tramsheds.

The bus depot reopened in late 2010 as a depot dedicated to operating articulated buses for the new Metrobus network. The use of Tempe depot as a dedicated Metrobus depot was later deemed to be inefficiency. This was because most of the Metrobus routes (with the expection of the southern terminus of routes M20 and M30) had their terminus tens of kilometres away from Tempe depot These inefficiencies led to the relocation of some Metrobus services to other depots including Leichhardt, North Sydney and Randwick in 2013. As part of this optimisation of services, some regular STA services commenced out of Tempe depot for the first time in over 20 years late in 2013.

The depot currently is home to 85 buses, a mixture between 18 metre articulated buses for Metrobus services and 12.5 rigid buses for regular STA services. They service the southern most routes in the STA network, with a major hub in Rockdale.