KEY POINTS:
Government agency Ontrack is investigating another signals and power meltdown on Auckland's western rail line yesterday morning, which disrupted hundreds of motorists as well as scores of train passengers.
Level-crossing barrier arms were brought down by the failure, which lasted for an hour and a half from just before 8am - at the height of the Monday-morning traffic peak.
That left cars, trucks and buses queuing for more than 500m along roads converging on the main level-crossings at New Lynn and Glen Eden, tempting some to zig-zag around the barrier arms to get across the tracks, a practice frowned on by safety officials.
One rail passenger waiting at Glen Eden station said he saw two cars in a nose-to-tail collision on the Glenview Rd crossing, while they were trying to skirt around the barrier arms, although they got clear before his train pulled in.
But he said the train then faced a half-hour delay between Fruitvale and New Lynn, where he saw more queues of vehicles stretching back from the barrier arms, and no evidence of police or other officials to redirect them.
Another commuter who boarded a packed train running 25 minutes late at Kingsland at 9.05am - after an earlier one was cancelled - said he refused to pay his fare, given frequent assurances by rail officials that infrastructure improvements were meant to prevent such delays.
"It's hopeless - and that's not to mention the bottlenecks at Britomart with just one [rail track] in and one out."
Ontrack blames yesterday's disruption on the failure of both a power transformer and a new back-up generator which it installed after serious signalling problems at the height of its western-line track duplication work between Henderson and New Lynn in March.
An Ontrack official said the back-up generator had worked well when needed on at least one previous occasion, and noted that the barrier arms were meant to come down and stay down as a "fail-safe" measure when signals were disrupted.
The standard practice was for trains to slow down as they passed crossings during signals failures, and for Ontrack to send out staff to wind barrier arms up and down manually, when it was safe to do so.
But Auckland's heavy road traffic sometimes meant delays in trying to rush staff to trouble spots.
