Note: To those attempting to accuse me of being disrespectful of the fact that there was a death, it should have been made quite clear that I had no idea of what exactly happened. Blame the lack of communication, not me. I pay my condolences to the family of this victim at Burwood station. Ending your life is not how you fix life’s problems. I also hope that the driver of the train is okay too, that would be terrible to see something like that.
Thanks for covering that important point mate My friend was on this train that was involved in the incident and heard the impact... Im thankful she didnt end up witnessing it, would have been a lot to process... I have a family friend as well who was a train driver, now does driver training, instruction, compliance etc, who witnessed a fatality involving another train travelling in the opposite direction a few years ago... Having struggled with thoughts myself many years ago I can honestly say Im glad to still be here. There is always something or somebody worth sticking around for, ALWAYS. Nothing lasts forever, not even pain. Keep kicking life in the ass, guys
There was a freight derailment at Mittagong, I was on the first SHL service to be stopped/terminated at Picton that morning. Again not a whole lot Sydney Trains/NSW TrainLink can do to anticipate that.
Far better communication is needed in such events. Also greater priority needs to be placed on getting trains back into service. It should not take hours to deal with this and no investigation is needed just collect the video from the train and stations all the information is there to work out what happened after the event.
Emergency services requested the shutdown and then once everything is back up you’ve got drivers/trains out of position. As someone who was caught up in this Saturday morning I actually think the communication in the trains and platforms was actually pretty decent given they had little chance to plan for it nor know when the lines would partially/fully open through Croydon/Burwood.
Hi Elliot, in the years of living in Sydney, I don't remember ever experiencing anything like this. It is sad hearing about the person at Burwood losing their life. I remember years ago down here in Melbourne, our trains on the Frankston line were badly disrupted after a work colleague, who I personally knew, lost their life, while attempting to cross a train line and being hit by a passing goods train. On that particular morning, there was very thick fog, which made the situation even worse. Anyway, take care. Rob in Melbourne Australia.
Thanks for your interest. Nothing flash, just Canva. Took about 20 minutes to make, I’ve always had a sketch of a train wheel so I used that and fixed it up a little to make it what it is today. Inspiration came from the look of the Waratah train wheels, as when I was younger I’d always admire what makes the train move so efficiently, therefore why I made it part of my channel logo.
I can remember train strikes in around 1970 which were pretty horrendous. I thought reliability was much better, until earlier this year. Apparently due to some signal failure on a Wed afternoon the whole network stopped for hours . Not pretty!
Townhall station :( they really ought to rip it apart and restructure it because it has never changed since 1999 when I first when to Sydney and seriously Sydney needs to really deal with this issue :(
Must have been one of the most frustrating commute you've ever had! Sydney Trains REALLY needs to fix operational issues because it is getting annoying.
Chaos at the extreme. You are correct when you say every system will face delays from time to time but Sydney Trains is becoming a joke. I have my theories about it which you already know and I won't repeat here. The problem is the mass removal of crossovers and loops which allowed Trains to be able to change to another line and continue. This is most evident between Summer Hill and Ashfield where it was possible to have Trains overtake the train in front and therefore avoid major delays. A fatality at Burwood should only affect the 2 lines where the incident occurred but there is no facility to crossover these days. Operational reasons is a general term which covers almost every incident. I fear this will get worse before it gets better.
The problem with the Burwood fatality is that four lines were closed. No matter how many crossovers exist at the end of the day, you would have to squeeze six lines of traffic onto two at Burwood and it’s only as strong as the weakest link. Even then, it is possible to put all traffic from the western and northern lines onto the Local at Strathfield and bring them to their correct tracks at central (which they have done multiple times before for various trackwork operations) but there's still a basic capacity problem. Adding to the capacity crunch, the Main Suburban line experienced higher train frequencies on Saturday due to the closure of the Bankstown line. In terms of them closing four lines, the affected train was on the Up Main with staff using the Down Main. Keeping the other four open would essentially leave no safety margin for any crews working on the Down Main which isn't preferable.
Plus it was an emergency services request to shut all the lines for a while before local was reopened. So with that request it is hard for Sydney Trains to do anything really, especially when they probably didn’t receive a timeline from emergency services of when they could reopen.
if it was Brisbane they would have just cancelled the late service and then say when the cancelled train arrived that the next train came early just to sound good.
I experienced delays as well. I was travelling on the Central Coast to Hawkesbury River two days before this incident happened. We were halted at Hornsby for 10 minutes and were delayed since the Brisbane XPT was in front of us. The main cause of the delays was a broken down freight train at Asquith.
Bummer, that’s unfortunate.. the announcements were a mixture of “medical emergency at Burwood” and “police operation at Burwood” obviously showing Sydney trains usual lack of communication to both staff and passengers.
@tsetstransport It was once a policy to not announce a fatality until the family was notified. The process after a fatality can take many hours to investigate and isolate the train involved at the incident location. The remains can't be moved or removed until the forensics team has arrived and carried out their investigation. The train crew must be relieved immediately, and a replacement crew is found. After the train is removed and the remains taken away a cleaning crew must make sure there is no obvious sign of the fatality before the line is re-opened. The problem during this procedure is the lack of a crossover as stated. This can take up to 10 hours depending on the location of the forensics team and cleaning crew prior to the incident.
In Central could you have used the T8 line to Glenfield and back track to Liverpool? I have come across someone who also jumped in front of a train. Not a pretty sight in A&E and end result was losing a leg. Also 30+ years ago another incident in Hurstville that caused big delay. I met her probably 5 years after the incident with both above knee amputation. Depression is quite a beast.
A similar incident happened at stanmore, same exact story. Somebody committing, trains delayed for HOURS. My mum didn’t come home for hours because the trains were so delayed. I honestly feel so bad for everyone in these situations.
During the midnight that starts the 19th January 2024, I was on a train back from a concert where I go back from Central to Cabramatta. The train I was on was stuck close to Lidcombe for almost an hour due to urgent track repairs. In fact the train even had to reverse back to Flemington so it can arrive into Lidcombe Platform 2 instead of Platform 4. But then the train HAD to be stuck before Platform 2 at Lidcombe because of another train on that same platform stopping there for about 20 minutes. It was infuriating! Makes me even more impatient to see the long overdue Sydney Trains Major Timetable Overhaul happen already!
that happan at Auburn norammly no trains stop at platfrom 2 but major incident b12 was terminating telling if going to parramatta or Penrith go on platform 4
There are 6 through tracks at Burwood. Only one needed to be shut down. Whilst every decent person feels empathy for a death in this situation, authorities are over reacting by shutting down all lines, and I suppose we can thank all the rabid lawyers for that. In london recently, I witnessed 5 lanes of a motorway being closed for hours because of a car fire on a hard shoulder. Absolute nonsense! The frustration built up by delays, and the inability of people to get to their destination on time, probably caused another dozen deaths and fatalities?
I was caught at Central on a T9 service due to depart at 10:20am. Announcements on my train were every 5-10mins, eventually we were told we could get a train from platform 19 to Strathfield and then change. Needless to say by now platform 19 was massively crowded and a train showed up that was mostly empty and filled to crush capacity pretty quickly. All stops to Strathfield and got off there. A CCN train to Wyong was sitting on platform 1 so I managed to get that to Epping. Once at Epping I needed an all stops to get to Cheltenham, after waiting at Epping for about 15mins they announced they had no idea when the next all stops service would arrive. At this point I phoned a friend and got a lift back to Cheltenham. When we came past Croydon emergency services were still there, this was probably close to midday. What surprised me is when they had announced several times that emergency services were involved it was safe to assume there was likely someone had been hit by a train. So between the emergency services request to stop services, the track work on some lines and then trains being well out of position for driver changes I don’t think it is particularly fair to criticise Sydney Trains much over this. Interestingly, this was the second major incident I’d encountered for the day, I had started the day trying to go to Bowral and my train was stopped and terminated at Picton as a freight train ahead of us had derailed at Mittagong, fortunately (given the extremely low frequency service on the Southern Highlands line) there was a train heading back to Sydney from Picton about 15mins later that had just got through before the derailment.
I arrived at Central station in an attempt to travel to Rhodes train station. There was track work on some on the lines, as there has been most weekends for the last 6 months or so. But none on the line I was going to take. There was no announcements and station staff knew nothing. After about 30 minutes an announcement was made stating no services are departing from Central terminal. I gave up waiting and went home. I looked on Reddit once I got home and many users said that there was a man who committed suicide at Burwood at around 10am after jumping in front of a Waratah set train from the Shaftesbury Rd bridge. Reddit user said it happened so fast and unexpectedly that nobody could do anything but close their eyes.
This was a big incident! Me and my friend were doing a train trip where we have to travel to a station for each letter of the alphabet, and we were originally going to catch the 10:24 Lithgow service from Central to get to Blacktown, then Quaker's Hill (the only Q station on the network), but our service didn't end up moving. We ended up catching a slow suburban train to Liverpool via Regents Park, getting off at Cabramatta and modifying our route. It vastly jeopardised our plans, and our "speedrun" ended up taking 7 hours instead of our original plan of 4 hours. Interestingly, I also heard some announcements stating the emergency was at Croydon, though this was a V Set with very mediocre speakers so we could've misheard it. But it was very interesting to experience. My prayers go out to the family of the victim. But I do also hope this helps improve the network and more action is taken to ensure that incidents like this, as well as the ones at Central, can be less common or have their impacts reduced
I agree, but what is more of a concern is the lack of crossovers which can allow trains to continue operation by using other lines to get around the incidents, not to mention the usual lack of communication too.
Bankstown Metro provides the required backup. Sydney Trains can divert some trains to Bankstown. Plus terminate trains at Lidcombe, loop around Olympic Park & head back out. Sending passes on a shuttle to Bankstown. Yesterday's issues weren't helped by driver hours & getting the driver home. Metro avoids this issue. If run properly, similar incident could occur in peak & rail network could recover by 1pm with Bankstown Metro.
@@jules_hams1583As a former Sydney resident who lived in the south along the T4 line. I realized there is a massive flaw with the Metro. I would much rather have it go to Hurstville instead of Bankstown. Here are two very important reasons why 1) We still keep the Bankstown line. At Sydenham there is 6 platforms but 4 are in use. Trying to link the Metro to the Eastern Suburbs parallel tracks would be a challenge without kneecapping the Bankstown line but Reason 2 will make up for it 2) The Metro runs parallel with the Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra line all the way to Hurstville this helps with two things A) During Rush hours the T4 runs express from Redfern to Hurstville stopping only at Sydenham, Wolli Creek and Hurstville while also running local trains to Hurstville that stop in between. Though I believe some trains terminate at Hurstville as an Express. B) There is redundancy and consistent frequencies for us residents in South-East Sydney rather than the T4 during rush hours having 3 terminals and horrible frequencies. The drawbacks and there are some good arguments is that Freight would be affected which would be true and rob some frequencies for T4 services until Sydenham. The T8 can’t run via Sydenham if there is disruption on the Airport line and can’t run services between Central and Glenfield via Airport and Revesby But I think we would be better off than what the Bankstown line is experiencing. But you know transparency with whoever is in charge which I’m not surprised.
