Sydneysiders have been hit with fresh train delays, and repeated outages due to outdated communications technology and poor backup system planning are likely to continue, a transport expert has warned, as the Perrottet government is accused of neglecting upgrades.
The warning came on Tuesday morning as commuters were told to “allow plenty of extra travel time” due to urgent signalling work at Broadmeadow and train repairs on the north shore line at Waitara that caused delays across the network.
Tuesdays’ disruptions follow the failure of the Sydney rail network’s digital radio system last Wednesday, which resulted in a network-wide shutdown that left every train parked for 90 minutes. The breakdown occurred during the afternoon peak, stranding 250,000 commuters.
There were further issues, including downed wires and isolated outages, across the train network on Friday and Saturday.
Prof David Levinson, a transport planning expert at the University of Sydney’s school of engineering, said the communications network used by Sydney’s train network “is far from cutting edge”.
But Levinson said “more importantly, the communications system should not have been designed with a single centralised point of failure”.
“For any major infrastructure, redundancy is required for safety and to keep the system operational,” he said, adding this “is critical for a place like Sydney CBD which depends on rail for the mass movement of people”.
Decentralised systems like the internet or the street network are more robust to widespread failures.
Levinson was scathing of how little information had been explained to the public about the outages, including follow-up issues seen over the weekend.
“From the perspective of customers, the reason why the system failed is less important than accurate information in advance about system closures, their durations, and alternatives, which were not provided.”
Levinson warned repeated outages and slowdowns could occur given the state of the train network.
“These systems take a long time to install, and failures often have multiple causes,” he said, noting that “many systems do have some redundancy, so it sometimes takes two or three things to go wrong for a failure to occur, not just one”.
Meanwhile, Labor’s transport spokesperson, Jo Haylen, was scathing over reports that an internal Transport for New South Wales document from more than a year ago warned that Sydney trains’ digital radio system components were “obsolete” and fixing the problem was a priority.
Haylen said the most recent maintenance backlog for 2021-22 was $670m, up from $440m in 2019-20.
“The Liberal government was warned a year ago that components in the digital train radio system were already obsolete,” she said. “They knew that this could put the whole train network at risk but not enough has been done because there is no accountability.
“Passengers are yet again paying the price because no one knows who is in charge,” Haylen said.
Train drivers are reportedly going to receive handheld radios as a backup in case the technology fails again, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Levinson said this “seems a minimal threshold for redundancy”, but added “it is somewhat concerning not all of this … was thought through, or if thought through, that the solution was not implemented before”.
