V/Line enters second day with no regional trains
Updated ,first published
Furious Premier Jacinta Allan demanded Telstra pay “dollar for dollar” compensation to passengers stranded when the state’s regional train services were halted for almost 32 hours.
V/Line trains have slowly returned to service following a second consecutive morning of cancellations caused by the national outage, which saw 63 Victorians struggle to connect with Triple Zero.
Allan announced late on Thursday that the government would fund two days of free travel for regional travelers, but said the return of services “could not be the end of this” for the telecommunications giant.
“It is completely unacceptable that so many Victorians have been left without an essential service for so long,” he said.
“For a start, V/Line will compensate regional rail passengers who incur extra costs. I expect Telstra to match this dollar for dollar.
“But Victoria expects more than just compensation from Telstra. What we really want is change.”
“Australians have suffered too many major disruptions, and it’s always rural people who suffer the most.”
V/Line began resuming train services at noon on Thursday. He reported that all lines were operating until 16:00, but delays would continue and some services would be cancelled.
Although most phone calling features were restored late Wednesday morning, there was a delay in V/Line returning to full operations while security testing was completed.
“Australian Rail Line Corporation has this morning notified V/Line and other national rail operators using the National Train Communications System (NTCS) that it is safe to start operating trains following testing,” the regional rail operator said in a statement. he said.
“Before resuming services, V/Line carried out its own testing and operational checks to ensure that communications between network controllers and train crews were stable, continuous and reliable.”
Compensation offered to passengers through V/Line “will depend on the journey traveled for eligible customers” and “customers will not need to be refunded for additional costs incurred due to delays/interruptions.”
Triple Zero Victoria said on Thursday afternoon Telstra had reported a further 12 Victorian callers who had difficulty connecting to the emergency service line during the outage, bringing the total to 63.
A Triple Zero Victoria spokesman said Victoria Police had carried out welfare checks on 61 of the callers, none required assistance and was in the process of checking the remaining two callers.
Before train services resumed, V/Line general manager Will Tieppo explained that the fault was caused by Telstra’s 4G network interfering with the spare satellite phones used by each train. V/Line accesses the national train communications system run by the Australian Rail Line Corporation and says the issue is affecting the system across the country.
For most passengers, the last day was a day of deep disappointment, loss of time and ever-changing travel plans. Keith Benning, from Broadford in Melbourne’s north, returns with his wife after three days of seeing a theater performance and visiting the Melbourne Museum.
“We were going to go to Craigieburn because the tube was working and then have our friends come and pick us up,” he said.
“This was our backup plan if we couldn’t find a bus.”
A limited replacement bus service was operating from Spencer Street for the duration of the V/Line outage, but this proved inadequate for the level of demand on Wednesday night and commuters were eventually told to return home.
Benning and others were surprised to hear that the trains had suddenly returned.
“We arrived here at 11.30 this morning and as far as we knew, there would be buses all day long. We went to the inquiry section for V/Line and they said there would be no trains running today,” he said.
“When people started getting off another bus, I went up to the driver and said, ‘What’s going on, man?’ I said. and he said, ‘Oh, the trains are running now.'”
Andrea Bowman, from Wangaratta, caught a bus to Seymour on Thursday morning. By then, the round-trip trip with his friend and his four teenage sons, normally costing $11 each, had ballooned to $600 in lodging and toilet costs.
“I will drive my car to Melbourne now,” he said.
Bowman said he would miss a day’s work in Wangaratta. He was among hundreds of people trying to return home on Wednesday night, but when he saw angry crowds of passengers at the bus terminal, he immediately decided to book a hotel room.
“The staff were quite helpful this morning, I can imagine they could have dealt with a lot of abuse last night,” he said.
Tieppo defended V/Line’s management over the outage at Southern Cross on Wednesday night, which caused 1,700 people to wait up to two hours for a short supply of replacement buses.
“Disruption on this scale is unprecedented for us,” he said. “Organizing a bus replacement program for an entire network employing thousands of people a day would normally take months to plan.”
V/Line had 140 spare buses available on Wednesday. On Thursday, 100 replacement buses were operating, with one bus running every hour on each route.
V/Line announced that customers who are at least 60 minutes late can apply for compensation.
V/Line is a regional rail line but also serves some outer Melbourne suburbs, including western growth areas such as Melton and Wyndham Vale.
Melton Mayor Lara Carli said the outage highlighted the need to expand the Metro network by electrifying the Melton line.
“When a single outage could bring services to a halt and leave commuters stranded
“The fact that platforms have no choice in the middle of winter underlines the urgent need for a more reliable and resilient public transport network,” he said.
The Telstra outage was attributed to a software issue that sent the network’s timekeeping systems back almost 20 years to 2006.
Modern mobile networks rely on precise timing to authenticate devices, and the wrong date will cause parts of the network to reject customers’ phones.
The outage, which began early Wednesday morning, also caused more than 300 Triple-Zero calls to fail. Six people told Telstra they needed help after telcos and police carried out nearly 300 welfare checks.
It also affected interstate train services, lifts at a major Victorian university and emergency services pagers.
Late on Wednesday night, Telstra confirmed it was urgently investigating a second network fault that prevented some calls, including Triple Zero, from being connected, hours after the telco said it had resolved the first outage.
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