Commuters Had To Walk Through City Loop After Trains Lost Power In Melbs

By

Cam Tyeson

Published

Ordinarily the two biggest achilles heels of the Melbourne public transport network are “a little rain” and “any day over 25 degrees,” but this is a bloody new one altogether.
A fault in a train caused one entire section line of the City Loop tunnel to lose power, leaving 4 trains stranded underground between stations without lights or air conditioning during morning peak hour.
Metro Trains confirmed the fault occurred at around 8:15am this morning on the track servicing the Craigieburn, Sunbury, and Upfield lines. Two of the stranded trains managed to limp into train platforms around 15 minutes later, offloading passengers at Flagstaff and Melbourne Central.
But the other two trains weren’t quite so fortunate.
One, carrying somewhere in the vicinity of 700 passengers, was stuck underground for around an hour before power was restored and the train was able to make it to Parliament Station. Passengers remained largely in good spirits, surprisingly, though there were reports of carriage doors being forced open to allow ventilation.
The remaining train, the one that caused the initial fault, was rendered utterly useless; stuck on tracks between Parliament and Flinders Street with 200-odd passengers on board. And according to Metro’s CEO Mike Houghton, they remained there for upwards of two hours before the order came to disembark and walk along the tunnel tracks to Flinders Street Station.

“The incident train where the train had the fault, 205 passengers were held on the train for up to two hours.”


“We managed to get the passengers off by walking them through the loop to Flinders St. There are escape routes in the tunnels, we didn’t need to use the escape routes we were within 300 metres of Flinders St Station so we were able to walk them through.”

Thanks to the recently switched-on phone reception throughout the City Loop, passengers were able to access their phones and the internet, with some posting photos off the eerily dark train carriages.

The Victorian Government has already promised an investigation into the incident, with Premier Daniel Andrews offering an apology to affected passengers.

“I do want apologise deeply to those impacted by this. It would have been a very distressing experience to go through.”


So while it’s undoubtedly a rare and very shitty situation to have to have been in, it seems the good attitudes of commuters prevented things from getting much, much worse.

Also, big shout out to this bloke, who might well have given the most quintessentially Australian evacuation order of all time.

“Yeah look, soz about that. Give us about ten minutes and we’ll get youse all out.”


Dog bless you, mate.

Source: ABC News.
Photo: Matt Burke/Twitter.

Tags:

, , , ,

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV

Trending Now