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I’m a public transport tragic (or, railfan), and I especially love studying several aspects of public transport: the operations, economics, signaling, communications, planning, history and equipment. And now living in a city with generally good public transport, I’m having a lot of fun.

But I’m also getting frustrated and upset when things don’t work the way they should.

I’m not talking about delays and cancellations, fares and ticketing, stop-spacing and timetabling, or even overcrowding. What I’m getting most frustrated about in Melbourne at the moment is this strange problem the Victorian government has where they seem to think they can outsource their problems.

If you missed the lead story in Melbourne’s news today, check out the latest article in The Age. Every single electrified train line in the Melbourne network (which is every single line bar one) had multiple cancellations, and delays upwards of 60 minutes, throughout the morning peak this morning. It cost an estimated $12 million in lost productivity and directly cost Melbourne’s train operator, Metro, $1 million in government fines (and possibly more with the cost-sharing of a free-public-transport day this Friday).

Seems fair – the city’s trains grind to a halt, and everyone takes their cars into work causing doubling of peak-hour road travel times which in turn blows out tram and bus timetables. It was a pretty tough morning if you needed to get anywhere and don’t happen to own a pair of wings.

Yes, it seems fair to blame and fine the train operator. Except the problem started with electrical wiring at 4:55am this morning near Southern Cross Station, one of the city’s busiest. As a train with 20 passengers on board traveled underneath, the wire overhead suddenly snapped, failed, or got tangled – depending on which news report you read – and took out all power bar emergency lighting at the Southern Cross station. Because no trains could then travel through Southern Cross (which all trains on the Melbourne metropolitan train network must), a bank-up of trains started and steadily grew, right into peak hour when power was finally restored. However, it was already too late – services had been cancelled and delayed and there were too many services to run and not enough time to run them in. The problems extended right through peak hour and continued until late morning.

So, whose fault was it?

Well, the exact details are scarce, and I hope we’ll see more in tomorrow’s papers. But if you ask the government, it’s Metro’s fault, and if you ask Metro, well, they’re apologising, then saying they’re sorry, then apologising again.

The maintenance of all electrified track in Melbourne is the responsibility of Metro. But they only took over the contract to manage and operate Melbourne’s train network at the start of December last year, after warning in their management tender that “many of the older track components are in a condition which does not provide the level of reliability and ride quality that is required by a modern metro system” (according to a Herald Sun article from earlier this year). Metro have now had control of Melbourne’s 16 train lines – made up of 200 stations and 830km of railway track – for less than 8 months, in which time they’ve been continuously held to account by the government to run on-time services for 20 hours every day. They’ve done a good job, but due to equipment faults, unruly passengers and “police requests”, they haven’t yet met targets on an out-of-date, inherited system that has been mismanaged – and likely underfunded – for decades.

But it’s still Metro’s fault. It’s their branding on the train, so even though they’re not in control of these problems which have plagued the Melbourne train network for years before they won the contract to manage it, the government can take the convenience of outsourcing the problems as well as the management (and fining Metro when it’s not all magically fixed).

Am I missing something really huge, or does this state government deserve no votes on the 27th November?

It’s Blog Action Day tomorrow and while that’s about all bloggers around the world posting on a topic they want to generate action on, I figured it’s a good excuse as any for me to create some action on my blog again! Last post January 09? Hopefully I don’t leave it for that long again!

There is so much I could write about, so much I’ve had the privilege of learning this year, and so many people who have been a part of it. But the biggest thing that has happened to me this year is meeting the beautiful Lillian Yau from Melbourne – and we’ve now decided that I’ll be moving to Melbourne soon so that we can be a little bit closer to each other!

This will mean leaving my job at 1WAY FM and searching for new work – hopefully within media or Christian ministry – in Melbourne. There’s a lot I can share about this so I will be doing so through this blog, Facebook, Twitter, and on air at 1WAY FM over the next month or so.

I look forward to conversing with you and sharing with you some of what I’ve learnt this year.

Tim