The operations of NSW Railways in recent and not so recent times has been of interest to the city journalists with very few compliments handed out.
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The recent spectacle of thousands of passengers marooned at city (Sydney) stations due to the apparent failure of the allegedly modern signalling equipment; what a shemozzle.
In 1991 your predecessor Bruce Griffiths covered the alterations in rail operations following the dispensing of services of employees with many years experience.
He wrote an editorial on 22.2.1992 and was very critical of the movements of experienced staff.
His concluding remarks were: "the people running State Rail today couldn't run a toy Hornsby train set let alone a tremendous asset in danger of disappearing. Hard to believe?
Keep this and see what we've got left in eight years from now.”
It hasn't improved up to 2018.
Well we didn't have to wait eight years.
The new "fruit cakes" took over and well inside eight years made a proper mess.
Today 2018 nearly 26 years later the efforts seen on TV and newspaper reports clearly illustrate that these highly educated fruit cakes do not have a clue.
The present government is in the same boat with reports of new trains manufactured overseas cannot traverse the tunnels over the Blue Mountains and many of the suburban stations platforms are too narrow to accommodate the extra wide carriages.
A few days ago the CEO on TV said we will be back to business tomorrow morning; well tomorrow has eluded them altogether.
Now moving back a year or two, to exactly 1948, the Government in its usual wisdom imported the American company "ESBASCO" to check and improve the movement of all trains in and out of Sydney, to and from country.
Their comprehensive report finally reported they were not able to do so as they concluded in that report that "they were amazed that 20 trains per hour cleared Strathfield each hour- that's one train every three minutes."
Today clearance are nothing like that, in fact if a train comes in 5 minutes late that is deemed to be on time.
We the public do not have to be critical of the present rail operations those "fruit cakes" are doing the job for us.
Perhaps a further change in Govt. will see experienced staff (if they can be found) to organise the tabling of trains, when all requirements are considered when programming is done.
The past few months has seen shemozzles that were never seen by the old staff of yesteryear and they did not have all the modern technical equipment to assist them.