" Efficient and good service " are usually not accolades conferred on anything run by the government - nor are these attributed to the New South Wales rail network.
Track maintenance is to be carried out on the south coast Illawarra line and for the next eight weeks loyal rail users can expect their travelling lives to be made a misery.
Trains will not run on weekends - and there will be five blocks of weekday interruptions involving peak times. October will be the worst month with work scheduled for fourteen of it's thirty one days.
During the cancellation of rail services travellers will be provided with buses - and that is where a monumental problem starts. Almost without exception the rail bosses schedule about half the buses needed to service the number of passengers involved.
As a result, passengers are left stranded until another bus eventually arrives, in many cases over an hour later - and sometimes that is also overfilled to capacity. A two hour rail journey can often degenerate to a five hour bus trip !
The mind boggles at the thinking that creates this chaos. Passenger numbers are known to the rail people because they have two clear indicators to consult. The first is previous history of numbers carried on each train service - and the second is the number of tickets sold via automatic ticket machines prior to the start of each trip.
Ticket sales clearly indicate the point at which passengers join the train - and their intended destination !
It does not take Einstein to figure out how many buses are needed to move that number of people.
Except that is not what happens !
The only conclusion from the past dismal performances is that either the rail people are totally incompetent - or that they don't care !
What odds that the same lack of planning causes travellers to be late for work - and late home - during this coming maintenance period ?
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