My comment piece in The Age this morning:
Metro Trains, it’s time you got your act together
This is a result of last Thursday night’s complete train network shutdown — thankfully not during peak hour — when a control room alarm caused an evacuation.
Oh crap. @metrotrains control room evacuation. (Showgrounds "good service" has no scheduled services at the moment). #MetroBingo pic.twitter.com/LnmnSap2Do
— Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) November 10, 2016
Despite the Age piece’s headline, Metro runs the system day to day, but investment in infrastructure is the responsibility of the state government. In this case, it seems obvious that moving the control room to a sensible location, in its own building, not at the mercy of every building tenant’s minor fault or evacuation alarm (real or actual), would be beneficial.
Interestingly, I understand V/Line was able to keep running their trains on the sections of their network that don’t share track with Metro, as they have a separate control room.
This indicates that decentralised local control rooms, perhaps as part of the ongoing sectorisation plans to run the various Metro lines more independently, would have had prevented such widespread disruption.
5 replies on “Metro bingo”
Yes, does seem odd that an alarm going off in a control centre should shut down an entire system. Why is there no back up at a separate site?
@Roger, I mention that in the comment piece. There is a backup site, but it takes some time to activate.
Well done! On the front page of the website! In the headline bit where they put the stuff they actually want people to read! Good work.
I should’ve been on my train home from Geelong at that time, but my train had been replaced by a coach. An hour and 50 minutes to Sunshine via the scenic route (stopping all stations), which was a hour longer than normal. So can’t comment on how V/Line trains were going!
Melbourne does need to build its own separate control centre for the Metro for the network. Sydney is building a new integrated network centre for $276 million http://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sydneytrains/community/roc away from the main operations currently at Central.