Warning issued to rail passengers in Sydney after the entire network was shut down due to a radio malfunction that left thousands stranded
Rail passengers in Sydney are being warned to prepare for possible delays this morning after the network came to a standstill due to a technical glitch yesterday.
All trains were halted on the platforms for about an hour until services resumed at around 4:00 pm.
A huge backlog spilled over to other public transport and caused an Uber spike that was slammed by the transport minister.
Transport NSW had to stop all trains for safety reasons after the digital train radio system failed.
The system has since been restarted and the grounded trains have started running again.
Just after midnight, the official Twitter accounts for all Sydney Trains lines warned people to be prepared for today.
‘Take into account a lot of extra travel time due to a disruption in train communication earlier’, according to the official messages.
The screens at Central Station were completely blank on Wednesday afternoon after a malfunction
Trains run with a lower frequency & modified timetable. Stops and platforms can change.’
Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland said the problem stemmed from an “extremely rare” failure of the train’s digital radio system at around 2:45pm.
“For safety reasons, this meant bringing trains back to the platforms so that customers could safely disembark those trains,” Mr Longland said.
Sydney Trains runs about 3,000 trains a day and authorities said it would take some time to return to normal schedules.
Passengers were advised to expect major delays and interruptions in service until late in the evening.
At the town hall station, staff had closed off the area behind the turnstiles and asked commuters to go down to the ground floor, but many lingered.
Greg Jacques said the delay made a terrible day worse as he was on his way to St George Hospital in Kogarah to see his dying uncle.
“I’m stressed, man. I have to say goodbye to my uncle because he is going to die,” he said.
Joanna Dunbar-Poole, 79, said she was on her way home to Cabrammata when the lockdown hit and taking a bus home wasn’t an option for her.
“I’ll go to Central and sit there and if it goes all night, I’ll stay in a youth hostel or something,” she said.
Engineers were unable to reset communications services after they went down and instead switched to a backup system, which took about an hour.
“This system is a critical communication system between our rail operations center and our train crew,” said Mr. Longland.
“And while the rail network was fully operational, we couldn’t run the trains safely while the train crew couldn’t communicate with the rail operations center.”
There was chaos at Wynyard Station (pictured) where travelers were turned away from the gates due to the network outage
The first indication was that it was system related and not a cybersecurity issue.
“We will fully investigate the cause of the incident to ensure it does not happen again,” he said.
“We apologize to customers for the interruption to service this afternoon.”
Transport for NSW said it was requesting additional buses and working with carriers and light rail to run additional services to help with service recovery.
Labour’s transport spokeswoman said tens of thousands of people, including schoolchildren, had been stranded again.
“Passengers have been dealing with chaos, cancellations and delays for over a year now,” said Jo Haylen.
“Passengers will ask tonight where the backup systems are and where the backup buses are so they can go home.”
Commuters had to wait for more than an hour after trains grounded at 3 p.m