KEY POINTS:
Motorists and bus passengers shared the frustration of Auckland rail commuters yesterday as signalling faults again struck the troubled western line.
Intersections such as the notorious Clark St roundabout in New Lynn and Glenview Rd-West Coast Rd in the centre of Glen Eden became jammed with morning commuter traffic after level-crossing barrier arms were brought down by a power cut to railway points and signals.
"It's bad enough that the trains are crap, but now they're stuffing up the traffic as well," said one commuter, who had swapped from rail to buses but found no escape when he became stuck in a queue at Glen Eden.
"Drivers got so frustrated that they ignored the signals and were zig-zagging through the barrier arms. As you can imagine, it was a highly dangerous situation and the traffic was a nightmare," he said.
A similar scenario saw traffic banked up as far as a kilometre back from the Clark St roundabout before police used makeshift stakes to prop up barrier arms at New Lynn's main rail crossing, enabling them to usher vehicles through while keeping an eye out for slow trains.
Although rail operator Veolia Transport says that practice is not desirable from a safety standpoint, general manager Chris White noted that the standard procedure when faults forced barrier arms down was for trains to slow to 10km/h through crossings.
But that caused further delays for trains, which were running at least 40 minutes late yesterday morning, mainly because of a need to manually operate points in the absence of mechanical controls.
Mr White said the disruption was caused by a failure at 5.40am of signals operated by Government rail agency Ontrack, one of many caused in recent weeks by that organisation's construction of duplicate tracks between New Lynn and Henderson.
That was compounded by another failure at 11am of signals between Henderson and Waitakere, where preparatory work has begun on another duplication stage. By 3pm, when the faults were fixed, 20 rail services had been disrupted. Passengers were either shuttled by buses to their destinations or had to wait for other late trains.
But that was not the end of yesterday's troubles.
Just as services were struggling back to normal for the evening peak, another unspecified signalling fault struck soon before 5pm, delaying homebound passengers by what Mr White estimated was 15 minutes.
"Obviously this is an unsatisfactory situation," he said.
"This construction work is ongoing, but there has been no resolution around faults."
Veolia took steps early this week to ease difficulties through "planned cancellations" in which it has stopped seven trains a day from running between New Lynn and Waitakere and has removed one shuttle service to Britomart, to give remaining services a better chance of keeping to timetables.
It has contracted three buses to shuttle passengers beyond New Lynn and has two more on standby.
