Wellington commuters can expect at least another day of difficulty with the region’s trains on limited services and not enough buses to pick up the slack.
Thousands were stuck on slow-moving and overcrowded trains on Monday after the breakdown of the only piece of equipment that can do safety checks on the tracks.
“It’s bloody ridiculous,” one passenger told RNZ. “Standing room only from Silverstream; Waterloo, people couldn’t get on; Petone, they didn’t even open the doors.”
“Kids have got school and you know, you can see the panic in their faces,” said another.
Metlink, which operated trains and buses in the capital, said KiwiRail had fixed the specialist car and was now doing checks on the Kapiti track. Each track was normally checked four times a year.
KiwiRail said normal services were expected to resume on Thursday. Metlink said until then, extra carriages were being added to try to ease congestion.
Traffic was more congested than normal on Tuesday morning, not helped by an accident at Linden on State Highway 1.
Greater Wellington Regional Council transport committee chairman Thomas Nash told Morning Report it had slightly improvedwith extra trains put on at 6.30am - but it was still a “shocker” of a situation and “stressful for everybody”.
Greater Wellington Regional Council councillor Thomas Nash. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Putting on more buses was not an option, he said, because the city was already short on drivers and unable to run its normal services, let alone cover for trains.
“If we were to move buses around, that would mean that the bus problem would be worse for people. You’re sort of just shuffling the problem around, so we didn’t think that was worth doing. It’s also quite hard to do with only a couple of days’ notice.”
Metlink general manager Samantha Gain agreed, saying there was no “latent capacity” in the bus system.
“Also, the bus routes generally go, you know, in quite different places. They don’t duplicate the rail network, and we know in a situation like this that there’ll be road congestion as well, so adding additional buses is really not something that we’ve been able to do.”
Both Gain and Nash cited the short notice they got from KiwiRail too, only finding out on Friday, and urged people to work from home if they could in the meantime.
“Travel in the off-peak if you can,” Gain said. “If you have some flexibility about working times and that sort of thing, please do that because that frees up the capacity for the people who don’t have the flexibility.”
“Some people can’t, like, you know, teachers and nurses and schoolkids,” Nash said. “So if you do have the flexibility at all to work from home, this would be a really good week for that.”
Anyone charged for a journey they tagged on for but failed to catch could get a refund by contacting Snapper, which runs the electronic ticketing system in Wellington, Nash said. Snapper cards were not being checked on board, with trains “too chocka” for it to be safely done.
Nash said it was above his pay grade to promise a refund for customers unable to use their prepaid passes, but they would be “looking at everything we can do”.
Transport Minister Michael Wood said the disruption was not acceptable, ordering an urgent review of KiwiRail.
Michael Wood. Photo / Jed Bradley
“I think that it is good that we’re going to have a good look at KiwiRail’s asset management for critical infrastructure, like this track evaluation car,” Nash said.
“It’s good to be looking at the prioritisation of passenger rail because we want to scale up passenger rail in the Wellington region and in New Zealand, so we’ve got to get ready for that.
“But I do want to say Metlink and the council, we don’t have an unblemished record, so I don’t want to be drawing too much shade on our partners because we’ve all got to work together.”
