Why a slipped fan belt caused rail chaos
Date
February 14, 2013
Comments 155
Jacob Saulwick
Transport Reporter
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ANALYSIS
Commuters wait for trains at Town Hall Station during peak hour.
Systems at risk ... a peak hour crowd at Town Hall station. Photo: Janie Barrett
How can one slipped fan belt in one air-conditioner in one building at Strathfield bring much of Sydney's entire transport system to a gruelling, frustrating, crippling, halt?
The answer, it would seem, owes to the pros and cons of progress. And a train system that is always on the verge of improvement, but never seems to get there.
When smoke emerged from the airconditioner in the relay room at RailCorp's Strathfield signal box just after 5.30pm on Wednesday, it triggered the evacuation of staff who, in essence, control the running of most of the city's trains.
Commuters crowd together reading papers and looking out the window on their journeys home at Town Hall during the peak hour rush. Story on train crowded. Today 20th of August, 2009. Town Hall, Sydney, NSW. Photo by kate geraghty.
Packed in ... RailCorp operations are becoming increasingly centralised. Photo: Kate Geraghty
For more than half an hour, during one of the busiest parts of the day, these trains were shut down.
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Commuters piled up on station platforms. Some sought an alternative path home on buses, clogging up buses and crowding at stops.
Others phoned for a lift, and peak-hour roads that were filled to bursting became even worse.
But why did so much depend on Strathfield? Why has RailCorp, the operator of Sydney's trains, let itself become so vulnerable to a minor mishap in one building?
Current and former RailCorp employees agree that RailCorp's control system has become more concentrated in the past two decades.
Some say this is an improvement: it allows for more efficient control of what trains run where, which ultimately allows more trains to run in Sydney at any one time.
But others say RailCorp and state governments have failed to make the investments needed to ensure a smooth back-up should anything go wrong.
(Signals tell trains and their drivers it is safe to move forward to a different section of track, or to change tracks. Signalling technology can vary from something as simple as a station attendant waving in front of a train driver, to electronic and automated controls that almost remove any need for a driver.)
On Thursday morning, a debate played out on radio about whether RailCorp had become too centralised.
The opposition transport spokeswoman, Penny Sharpe, mentioned the closure of a signal box at Hornsby in December.
This might have removed the capacity for some trains on the north shore to keep running when Strathfield went down, she said.
"It is my understanding that there previously have been contingency plans available for the sorts of things that happened yesterday," Ms Sharpe told ABC Radio.
Her explanation, however, was fast dismissed by RailCorp's chief operating officer, Tony Eid.
"I had an opportunity to listen to the opposition's interview and I had to say that there's none of that that resembles the truth," Mr Eid said.
He said that even if the Hornsby signal box was still running, trains through that area would still have been controlled by signal operators at Strathfield.
Mr Eid, who worked as a signal attendant early in his career, instead spruiked the benefits of concentrating RailCorp signalling equipment at two depots – Strathfield and Central.
"By leaving it at Hornsby as an old push-button signalling system, there's absolutely no way that technology will support a backup system," Mr Eid said.
But as commuters stuck on Wednesday night know, concentration brings its own risks.
A former signal branch employee, Tony Galloway, told Fairfax Media that the process of concentrating signalling systems at Strathfield and Central started in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But even as the new complexes were developed, Mr Galloway said, local "signal control panels" remained in place near many stations as a backup.
"We could even do hand signalling in an emergency," he said.
These local control panels, however, have been gradually removed from train lines over the past 20 years. Mr Galloway said he personally helped remove one at Bondi Junction. Others have been stripped from stations on the north shore.
"It started under the Greiner government but the previous Labor government continued with the same sort of policies and in many ways made it worse – particularly under Michael Costa," said Mr Galloway.
But even with local signal controls in place, it still would have been difficult to restore services on Wednesday night.
Unless qualified staff, for instance, were permanently placed near local control panels in the event of anything going wrong, they would have to travel to those control panels. This might have taken longer than the evacuation at Strathfield.
Another former RailCorp employee, who did not want to be named, said the back-up should have come from the other major signalling complex at Central.
This complex controls the Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra Line, which did not go out on Wednesday.
He said the Central complex should have had the capacity to take over the running of the rest of the train system within minutes of the Strathfield complex – which runs most of the rest of the trains – being evacuated.
This might have happened within a couple of minutes. It clearly did not.
In the meantime, Sydney commuters are being promised that more automation will bring more reliability.
"The redundancy will come from automation," Mr Eid said on Thursday morning. "You can plug a computer in anywhere."
But even limited versions of completely electronic signalling systems remain, on some estimates, a decade away or more.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/why-a-slipped-fan-belt-caused-rail-chaos-20130214-2eesn.html#ixzz2L8nRvrCh
