Article: Get set for ten-minute trains down the track

[ozbob]

From the Melbourne Age click here!

Get set for ten-minute trains down the track

Get set for ten-minute trains down the track
DEBORAH GOUGH
August 1, 2010

ALL trains - and ideally buses - would run every five to 10 minutes on Melbourne routes under Metro Trains chief executive Andrew Lezala's plans for the network.

But while the rail operator is aiming for greater frequency of services across the public transport system, Mr Lezala warned that it could take at least 12 months before any substantial improvements to reliability could be delivered.

Mr Lezala told The Sunday Age that to achieve a 10-minute or better frequency Metro needed more trains, more reliable stopping mechanisms and more infrastructure.

It would also have to untangle the city's train network of lines - a time-consuming and costly process.

''We want to get to a ... 10-minute frequency on any given line,'' Mr Lezala said. ''If we have a 10-minute frequency on our lines - and a 10-minute bus frequency on the orbital bus lines - then we have got a fantastic network because people will only ever have to wait, on average, five minutes.

The increased frequency of services could do away with the timetable, he said.

''Because we have a spider [network], if we want to have a spider's web we have to have the buses connecting the legs up effectively,'' he said. ''The buses have a vital role to play.''

At present, only some train lines are able to operate at 10-minute intervals during peak hours, with the slowest line (Upfield) operating at 20-minute intervals. Metro does not control buses; these are mostly operated by state-government-subsidised private companies.

The plan for more frequent all-day services might sound like a pipedream to the hundreds of thousands of commuters stranded when a broken wire between Flinders Street and Southern Cross stations wreaked havoc across the network last Tuesday.

To achieve Mr Lezala's vision, Metro has started to make significant changes to the way the network is structured and maintained. Its first step was to start to disentangle the train lines, so that when one line suffers a critical fault within the area bounded by North Melbourne, Jolimont and Richmond stations it doesn't shut down the whole network.

''When the services get to the centre, they cross over each other a lot,'' Mr Lezala said. ''If you traced the path of all the trains it would be like spaghetti. We need to get it so it is more like lasagne, so we have got ... flow through the middle, so if one line is in trouble it doesn't affect another line.''

Mr Lezala said Metro was also abandoning the ''run to failure'' policy of previous operators and implementing a ''reliability-centred maintenance'' system that plots when assets are most likely to fail and replaces them before a failure occurs.

He said the policy had been in use for 20 years on the ''fantastic'' Hong Kong network, operated by the same parent company MTR, and as a result their trains were ''20 times more reliable'' than Australia's.

The Public Transport Users Association, which has campaigned hard for increased train frequency, said a 10-minute timetable would make a huge difference to commuters.

Association spokesman Daniel Bowen welcomed Mr Lezala's commitment to increasing frequency, but said it was also essential that buses had the same improved frequency because it was the combination that would improve reliability.

Melbourne's train network is notoriously fragile: if it is too hot, it shuts down; if it is too wet, it shuts down; and if a diagonal wire between two lines snaps, it shuts down.

Mr Lezala said Metro knew what the problems were and was fixing them. ''There are some no-brainers that just need fixing and we are doing that, but we are also doing the sophisticated stuff of understanding when assets fail,'' Mr Lezala said.

Those ''no-brainers'' include replacing doors and faulty airconditioning that often causes train and system breakdowns, and fixing the traction problems of the Siemens trains.

Other improvements less obvious to passengers would be the installation of a back-up power source for signal lines so that trains can still run if one power source fails.

To help prevent a repeat of Tuesday's chaos, Mr Lezala said Metro had installed a new CCTV camera on a non-passenger train to film how wires are wearing under working conditions.

Asked whether Melbourne could ever expect Hong Kong reliability, Mr Lezala said it could ''come close'' within the confines of Melbourne's geography and layout but noted that the Hong Kong metro was purpose-built with separated lines. He said it could take another year before significant service improvements were delivered. ''We are really sensitive to the plight of our customers, and their experience on Tuesday was awful. We really are focused on improving things for them and really sorry that we put them through it. There is a lot to fix,'' Mr Lezala said.

[#Metro]

How deprived is the maintainence funding down there?

Finally, a bus + rail spider web network.