There are concerns about the planned opening date of a new Perth train line. 

WA Transport minister Rita Saffioti has announced that the Forrestfield Airport Link will open on October 10, following years of delays.

But unions say the completion of the new airport train line should not be rushed, claiming the tunnel is still a construction site and has not been handed over to the government’s Public Transport Authority (PTA) for assessment.

With just three weeks until the planned opening, secretary of the Rail, Trams and Bus Union (RTBU), Joshua Dekuyer, says his members are getting nervous.

“If it's given to the PTA just before opening, it limits our members' ability to ensure that current and accurate and relevant risk assessments [are] … carried out in time,” he told reporters this week.

Mr Dekuyer said the line is expected to reach ‘practical completion’ and be handed over about a week before services begin, but no date has yet been set.

He is concerned this will leave only a small window of time to identify and fix issues.

“The Metronet project, and the airport line, it's to be commended – but it has been plagued with safety and engineering issues over its construction, testing and commissioning stages,” Mr Dekuyer said.

“I'm sure many of them have been rectified and I believe there's some that might be still outstanding, but we need to see and need to be made comfortable that all that stuff has been addressed.

“We're not saying it's not ready, we're just saying we just want to be made sure that it is ready.”

The union wants to gain access to the new infrastructure to do its own checks.

“We don't even really know what some of the issues might be because we haven't been in there to see it and a lot of our members haven't been in there to go through it from an OHS perspective,” he said.

The long-awaited line has been more than a decade in the making, and will be the first major part of the Metronet strategy to reach completion, having been started by the former Coalition government in 2016.