No public transport service should rely on a single point of failure to function, yet that is exactly the position V/Line found itself in this week, and passengers paid the price.
Telstra’s network outage on Wednesday shut down the entire regional train network. With disruptions continuing into Thursday, well after the Telstra network had recovered, the PTUA is demanding that V/Line and the State Government provide answers:
- Why is there no backup plan for this exact scenario?
- How many other single points of failure does the regional train network have?
- What will be done to ensure this highly disruptive shutdown doesn’t happen again?
So far, V/Line has seemingly thrown its hands in the air and blamed Telstra entirely. Once it became clear the Telstra network was back up, that blame quickly shifted to the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC). At no point has V/Line explained why it had no contingency plan of its own, or why critical parts of the regional rail network have become single points of failure outside its control.
These aren’t abstract questions about network architecture. They translate directly into hours lost, missed appointments, financial losses and stranded passengers. We spoke with one passenger whose day illustrates exactly what’s at stake when V/Line has no fallback plan.
He boarded a service at Terang at 7:00 am. The train then stopped at Camperdown, and passengers were disembarked onto coaches a full two hours after the disruption started. He was taken by coach to Waurn Ponds, where he was still well short of his workplace. He then had to wait to be picked up by a colleague, only leaving Waurn Ponds at 11:45 am almost five hours after first boarding the train. What should have been a straightforward regional commute turned into the better part of a working morning lost.
This is one story, but the impact has been felt across the network, and passengers have been given very few real answers about why it happened or why it continued into a second day.
Staff on the ground appear to have handled a difficult situation well. Passengers caught up in the disruption have told us that staff on platforms, on coaches and on the phones did their best with the information and resources available to them. But good frontline staff can only do so much when they aren’t backed by proper planning. V/Line’s leadership needs to build a network where a single point of failure doesn’t cascade into two days of cancellations. That means genuine redundancy: backup communications, contingency plans for repositioning resources quickly, and clear protocols for restoring services and moving passengers as quickly as possible.
We understand that arranging replacement coaches is difficult, complex and time-consuming. However, this week’s disruption demonstrates that no number of replacement coaches can compensate for losing the entire regional rail network. The real solution is building a system resilient enough that failures of this scale are far less likely to occur in the first place.
Every decision V/Line makes should be tested against one question: how does it affect passengers? Regional Victorians often have few alternatives when services fail, making resilient systems and reliable contingency planning essential, not optional. By all appearances, that passenger-first mindset isn’t embedded in V/Line’s culture today. An organisation that genuinely puts passengers first doesn’t wait for a meltdown before developing backup plans; it plans for failures in advance and is ready to restore services and keep people moving as quickly as possible when they occur.
Passengers don’t want a blame game between V/Line, Telstra, the State Government and ARTC. They want to know what is being done to ensure they can trust their public transport service to get them where they need to go, without fear of being stranded for hours on end.