Rail network on the wrong track

The revolution had been gathering steam for years. Dark mutterings gave way, at their worst, to threats as commuters on Sydney's groaning rail system began to vent their anger on staff. Some were so intimidated they stopped wearing their uniforms.

Small eruptions of defiance became commonplace. Frustrated commuter Iain McGregor related one such instance in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, describing the reaction when a fellow traveller refused to show his ticket to transit officers until the trains began running on time.

"The rest of the passengers cheer and refuse to present their tickets. The greyshirts retreat out of the carriage."

Last Monday, at the urging of 24-year-old legal secretary Rebecca Turner, the rebels won their first victory.

New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, once Australia's most popular politician but now facing a tsunami against him, declared a day of free travel as a small measure of compensation for commuters forced to endure what he conceded was a "bloody atrocious" rail service.

It may cost the State Government A$6 million and set a furious Transport Services Minister, Michael Costa, at Carr's throat - but any goodwill it engendered was shortlived.

Monday's free services were dogged by the usual delays and frustrations, and as full fares returned on Tuesday and Wednesday, trains were running up to 20 minutes late on some of the system's busiest lines.

More was to come. Even as Carr promised to spare no effort to get the trains running properly, CityRail announced it would stop all services for two weeks from Christmas Day on the line to Bondi, the Sydney beach where Yuletide and New Year's revelling is almost an Australian institution.

The fact is that the vast commuter train system that acts as the arteries of Australia's largest city, taking hundreds of thousands of workers to and from work every day, cannot cope. And its failings are looming as the nemesis of the Labor Government that has held office for more than nine years.

Rail anger in Sydney rings almost as cruelly as Mao Zedong's warnings against enraging the Chinese peasantry: almost 30 years ago Carr's distinguished predecessor, Neville Wran, rode a similar wave of commuter anger to victory over the then-ruling Liberals.

Now the Liberals are catching the same wave back. Last month a Newspoll showed the Opposition nudging ahead of Labor. By last week, a McNair Ingenuity poll of key marginal seats in the Sunday Telegraph tracked a collapse of support for Carr, putting the Liberals 8 percentage points ahead.

Carr does not face an election until March 2007, but without significant improvements in a rail system suffering years of decline his fate will be sealed.

While hospital waiting lists, water shortages, the condition of schools and Government stamp duties also weigh heavily on his prospects, commuter frustrations are a daily itch that an increasing number of voters intend to scratch at the next election.

The McNair Ingenuity poll reported that 42 per cent of voters in the key marginals were less likely to vote for Labor because of failings in Sydney's public transport system. And although rail staff complain of vilification and even physical attacks, the poll shows that most voters place the blame squarely on the Government.

For a visitor to the city, there seems little to complain about. There's dirt, litter and graffiti, for sure, but where isn't there?

Reports of crime and violence on CityRail trains, and warning to stay near safe spots at night, can be a bit worrying, but no more than in other big cities.

Digital screens constantly update destinations and expected times of arrival at stations. Advertising on giant TV screens at least adds colour and movement. And for visitors who have little of the urgency of commuter travel, the system seems to work pretty well.

But it doesn't if you live in Sydney and rely on the trains to get you to work on time.

Official figures show that when Carr won office in 1995, more than 90 per cent of trains ran on time, or within five minutes of the schedule. By 2003-04, this had fallen to about 70 per cent.

CityRail has set a performance objective of 92 per cent of peak suburban services arriving within three minutes and 59 seconds of their schedule. Between Tuesday last week and this Monday, trains operating during morning peak times managed an on-time rate of 70 to 80 per cent. Delays of up to 10 minutes were common.

Going home, life was much worse. On the Tuesday about 60 per cent were on time, and on Wednesday about 80 per cent. But on Thursday, Friday and Monday, the on-time rate slumped to 30 to 40 per cent.

It is not just the delays that infuriate commuters. Cancellations, breakdowns and other interruptions frequently send tempers soaring.

On Tuesday, delays of up to 20 minutes were caused on three lines by power supply repairs; trains to Glenfield in western Sydney were instead terminated two stops short at Liverpool; and repairs to signal equipment delayed trains on other lines.

It is an enormous system. CityRail points out that it runs a fleet of 1500 carriages over 2000km of track controlled by more than 2500 signals, flowing into the broader state-wide system that carries 900,000 passengers a day on 2900 services. Problems, it says, are inevitable.

But the scale of the problems, and their frequency, is has been steadily mounting. The shedding of 30,000 jobs by the state railways in the past two decades, and cost-cutting enforced by Government cuts to capital and operating grants and subsidies have been blamed for much of this.

So has an increasing shortage of drivers that, critics claim, has been exacerbated by the NSW RailCorp's 21-month training period.

In July, RailCorp chief executive Vince Graham announced the cancellation of five peak-hour services because of the driver shortage. RailCorp had previously decided to prune weekend services by a third to provide more drivers for weekday trains.

To further ease pressure, RailCorp is considering reducing the time it takes to train drivers.

Carr blames most of the system's woes on this shortage, telling the Sydney Morning Herald: "This could be one of those emerging workforce shortages that will plague the Australian economy, and is already manifest around the nation when it comes to nurses. We seem to be heading for a generation of workforce shortages."

But the problems are broader than this, shown by an increasing tempo of failures and disruptions. Over the past eight years the system has been hit by an increase in derailments, rail bucklings, and other accidents such as a fire started by electrical failure that put six passengers in hospital.

Trains have overshot stations and been directed on to the wrong tracks. Four years ago two freight trains collided, injuring eight and pumping 20,000 litres of chemicals on to the tracks.

Two years ago up to 15 lines were out of action at weekends because of overloaded maintenance programmes.

And last February thousands of commuters were hit by a gas leak that hammered peak-hour services, with streams crossing the harbour bridge on foot in heat that caused some to collapse. That month, up to 100 trains a day had also been cancelled for want of drivers.

In July 2002 CityRail's new Millennium trains began running. Ten months later they were withdrawn because of a range of signalling, software, door, communications and air-conditioning problems. Although put back to work in April last year, technical gremlins continue to plague them.

But the worst were the accidents at Glenbrook, west of Sydney, and at Waterfall, in the south. The Glenbrook disaster killed seven and injured 51 when a commuter train ran into the back of another. Waterfall killed nine and injured dozens when a peak-hour train ran off the rails in a steep ravine.

With an industrial dispute threatening further woes this month, Carr finally sensed the strength of the storm gathering over his head. He apologised unreservedly to commuters, calling the service "plain defective", and promised to spare no effort to set things right.

Some major programmes are under way already, such as the A$1 billion ($1.1 billion) rail clearways plan intended to clear bottlenecks, reduce congestion and delays, and provide simpler timetables and more reliable and frequent services. Unhappily for Carr, it will not be completed until 2010, three years after he next faces voters.

In the meantime, commuters' blood continues to boil. Rebecca Turner caught that anger when her own fuse blew and she launched a campaign to convince fellow sufferers to refuse to pay for their travel on Monday.

"I know this isn't the solution, but the Government needs to realise that something needs to be done," she told reporters.

Carr, feeling the public gale at his door and the anger of backbenchers fearful for their seats, agreed, overriding his furious Transport Services Minister and declaring a fare-free day.

But that done, Carr now has to look for some real, fast solutions.