It’s a feeling all too familiar to Sydney residents – the weekend trip that suddenly gets thrown into confusion when you get to the train station to be greeted by the yellow sign and the three-word sentence nominated by the internet as the worst in the English language: buses replace trains.
But is trackwork in Sydney really more frequent and more disruptive than in other global cities? Experts say it is, but that embracing overnight repairs to reduce the number of weekend closures would increase labour costs and noise complaints.
After a string of critical failures that closed parts of the network and created chaos in recent months, the Minns NSW Labor government ordered a review into the train system it inherited after coming to power in March.
Interim findings warned that shutdowns were likely to get worse, with the number of active defects soaring to almost 40,000 due to a “far too tight” timetable introduced in 2017 that did not allow for adequate maintenance periods.
In response, the new transport minister, Jo Haylen, announced a maintenance blitz with works “around the clock from midnight Friday to midnight Sunday” every weekend for at least a year. About 600,000 passengers will lose weekend trains over the next 12 months.
“If you use trains on weekends, I’m sorry but you’re going to find yourself on buses – a lot,” Haylen said. “We have no choice.”
However, experts have questioned the way trackwork is traditionally conducted in Sydney, whereby entire lines are frequently shut down on weekends for the most intensive work, rather than being done overnight during the week, when passenger services don’t run anyway.
There are structural reasons that make maintenance in Sydney less efficient, but analysts say passengers are still being shortchanged, given how frequently their trains are out of action.
Older infrastructure, fewer crossovers
One key factor that means track maintenance periods – referred to as “possessions” – cause more profound disruption in Sydney than in other cities around the world is the age and design of the system. At more than 100 years old, the infrastructure requires maintenance more frequently.
Key lines such as the Illawarra, Western and Northern lines are mostly two tracks, and there are few turnbacks and crossovers to allow a train to essentially change lanes. By contrast, the Inner West line has multiple tracks and crossovers, allowing services to pass works during a possession.
The network was initially designed for all lines to pass through the city, meaning there is less opportunity for passengers to change lines for just a section of their journey.
As a result, there is little scope to focus maintenance shutdowns on small chunks of a line at a time to minimise disruption.
“At present whether we work on a small or large section of track during … a possession, the impact to passengers is often the same,” a Sydney Trains spokesperson said, but noted this could change when the new Metro line harbour crossing opens in coming years.
The structure also amplifies the pain from relatively small incidents. Downed signalling wires at one station have recently brought the Western and Northern lines to a standstill, given their connection through the city.
Terry Lee-Williams, a transport planning veteran who previously worked at Transport for NSW and is now director of future transport at Aurecon, says Sydney is unusually vulnerable to such incidents.
“There aren’t many cities like Sydney where you have a heavy rail network dependent on going through the city core. London’s Underground has sections of the network served by multiple lines, meaning there’s more redundancy – so if a chunk of a line is shut, passengers can still connect.”
Munich’s S-Bahn main line closed for just two weekends in 2017 when it needed thorough maintenance, while on New York’s subway (which runs 24/7), maintenance periods allow for partial services to continue.
There is also less potential in Sydney to limit maintenance to one track at a time so that trains can run at reduced frequencies in each direction by sharing the remaining open line. This is due to narrow gaps between some tracks that were built according to lower safety standards more than 100 years ago.
“We have trains with literally a 45cm air gap between trains, so you can’t just work on one line of the track,” Lee-Williams says. He says historical incidents of maintenance workers run over by live trains paved the way for strict workplace safety laws during possessions.
Possessions also need to be booked months in advance, but if bad weather causes the work to be abandoned, the slot is wasted.
Noise is ‘the price of living in a city’
Smaller manual maintenance tasks can be done in Sydney overnight.
But larger works using heavy machinery and which require more workers are done during the day “due to factors such as environmental noise constraints and increased costs”, the Sydney Trains spokesperson said, because “much of the network [is] in residential areas”.
“While heavy machinery is more efficient, that’s reserved for daylight weekend possessions,” the spokesperson said.
Trackwork can include signal system fixes and weather damage repairs, but tasks such as grinding tracks to remove deformations and the use of trucks on the tracks during possessions are extremely noisy.
“Before we had the curse of the reversing beeper and safety sirens, it was less of a problem,” Lee-Williams says. “You could do a lot of stuff without making too much noise and upsetting residents, but now with modern trucks it’s a … screeching pitch.”
Lee-Williams believes weekend possessions have one advantage – reducing how much time crews waste setting and packing up. “If you don’t finish the first night, it’s ready to do the next morning,” he said.
Prof David Levinson, a transport analyst at the University of Sydney’s civil engineering school, says he was struck by just how prominent train closures were after moving to Sydney.
“Other cities manage to make it work, do maintenance and keep trains running on weekends. It’s not like people don’t ride trains on weekends; in fact, weekend ridership is increasing lately.”
Levinson acknowledged the problem of night-time noise generating complaints, but pointed out that freight trains already run through Sydney at night. He says there should be a higher threshold for noise surrounding stations at night in the interests of keeping the city functioning.
“This is the price of living in a city, and being within walking distance of a train station. This is for the public good.”
“Train replacement buses in Sydney are so awful, and can get so loaded with people, it turns people off trains entirely,” he says. During peak times, train services in Sydney typically carry between 1,200 and 1,600 people, compared with about 80 to 110 on a bus.
‘Not acceptable in other cities’
“There’s a lot more scope for keeping a limited level of service,” says Christopher Day, who did his PhD in transport logistics at the University of Sydney.
Day says cities such as London have done maintenance in a smarter way for a long time, noting how tunnels of the Northern Line of the city’s Underground were widened each night during the 1920s when the system was closed.
“They took a section out every night, and got it ready for passengers the next morning. It shows if you really want to get things done overnight, you can.”
Levinson says in China a “swarming” approach is used that floods tracks with workers and can achieve in a night what would take months in Sydney.
Even in Sydney, the new private operator of the Metro lines maintains services during some possessions. With each track contained in its own tunnel, the line can remain operational by sharing one track for each direction, just running at reduced frequencies.
“For a long time now Sydney has been short-changed in the way maintenance has been done,” Day says. “The idea of completely shutting the lines is something Sydney has become accustomed to, and there hasn’t been much pushback on it.
“From a political level it’s seen as permissible, but that’s just not acceptable in other cities overseas.”
Day says the NSW government, and Sydney’s residents, ultimately need to rethink how the city maintains its train tracks.
“Yes, there would be challenges; it would be more expensive at night and need more acceptance of noise sometimes. [But] we might need to be prepared for that if we want to promote public transport use.”
