It's the question Sydney commuters ask whenever an incident on one train line plunges the city's entire rail network into chaos - why can't it just be fixed? Experts say to truly untangle Sydney’s train lines would simply cost too much money and cause too much disruption. Sydney Trains is hopeful some alternative solutions are on track but concedes they'll take years.
00:00It moves more than a million passengers a day across almost three and a half thousand
00:08services.
00:09Sydney train's sprawling spiderweb of lines is monitored 24-7 at this central nerve centre
00:15in Alexandria.
00:16But it can be a temperamental beast.
00:19Sydney's rail network is more than 170 years old so we've got a network that's been built
00:24over time.
00:25It's a complex network and it's a very busy network.
00:29In May the commute for thousands of passengers was plunged into chaos after a power cable
00:34came down on top of a loaded carriage between Strathfield and Homebush.
00:38It happened at one of the worst possible places on the network.
00:42We do have a number of key junctions on that network.
00:45Strathfield is a good example of that, Granville's another one, Redfern, a number of these locations
00:50where if we do have an incident it tends to impact not just one sea line but potentially
00:56the whole network.
00:57The issue is that up to six rail lines pass through these critical junctions.
01:01They share infrastructure like power and mechanical signals, meaning a problem on one line can
01:06bring all of them to a grinding halt.
01:09So it is a real challenge.
01:10We're trying to simplify the network, detangle those lines but it will take time.
01:15But could these problematic parts of the railway network ever actually be completely untangled?
01:20If we had a magic wand we would put all of the existing railway network underground and we would
01:25separate them out into separate lines completely segregated from each other so that there was no overlap.
01:32Experts say the massive cost and disruption involved mean it's a pipe dream.
01:37We'd be talking tens of billions of dollars if not more to untangle the existing railway network and more to the point it would mean having to move everybody off the rail
01:47network onto buses or onto the roads for a substantial period of time which would just be too disruptive for Sydney.
01:54Politically it's hard to spend money on things that don't really increase services but do
01:59improve resilience.
02:01Resilience is only a problem one or two days a year, in fact even less than that.
02:06Sydney Trains is confident the situation will improve in the future.
02:09It says when the South West Metro and Western Metro lines are complete, commuters will have
02:14more options if there are problems on the traditional rail network.
02:17I think the next few years as we roll out more metro investment is going to be good news for passengers
02:22but that doesn't remove the need to operate our network more reliably.
02:26It says more proactive maintenance, changes to timetables and the way train crews operate will help.
02:32And it started replacing the network's old mechanical signals with digital technology,
02:36meaning drivers won't have to rely on problem-prone trackside traffic lights.
02:41That is a long-term investment, so we're talking the next 10 to 15 years.
02:46What we need to do in the space we're in at the moment is really bridge that gap.
02:50So it seems the occasional gaping hole will still be hard to avoid.
