What do you mean, you ran out of gas?

Did anyone catch Close Up last night? If you missed it you can catch-up with it on TVNZ ondemand but in summary it was a report about the status of public transport, in particular the rail network and how Aucklanders are about to be hit with a 10c fuel tax on the promise that we'll get a state of the art public transport system.

Mike Hoskings laid into Mark Lambert, ARTA's General Manager of Customer Services, about the state of the over-crowding on trains during peak hour and the dangers and discomfort it causes. Last week a teenage girl got her arm caught in a door as a result of being forced through crowding to stand too close to the door. Blind people with seeing-eye-dogs not being able to get near enough to a hand railing to hold on to, let alone a seat. I think the list went on for quite a while.

Mark Lambert, who should have been a politician with the way he dodged answering the tough questions, tried to explain that all major cities experience crowding during peak hours on their public transport, and that Veolia Transport had already addressed this issue on the southern line by adding more services and increasing carriages.

The report clearly demonstrated in a fairly unbiased fashion the lack of satisfaction rail passengers have with the public transport service.

That was on the telly last night, this morning I parked in Glen Eden at 7am and my train arrived at 7.05, right on time. I boarded and sat there... and nothing happened. Then people who had just boarded with me started getting off again. Word was spreading that a train ahead of our one had run out of gas and was blocking the line.

Run out of gas?! How is that even possible? Surely in the year 2008 we have devised a guage for train diesel tanks which can turn on a little red light when they start getting low... I know they've been adding them to cars for as long as I can remember. I think even lawn mowers have them now!

So the friendly staff (no really, they were quite helpful this morning) had started to offer passengers their options, either catch the bus departing from right next to the train station in about 5mins, get back in their cars and drive themselves (for those with cars in Glen Eden) or to wait for an indefinite time because they didn't know how long it was going to take to clear the blockage. I overheard other passengers mention something about an hour wait, so I guess that's why the majority of people opted to try their luck with option one or two.

The leaving passengers were being given pass credits to be used another time. The majority left... I stayed. If for no other reason than to see just how long we were going to have to wait, and how hard the staff would work to keep us informed.

At about 7:30 only a handful of people remained in each carriage, and the odd passenger was arriving to be greeted by staff with the explanation about the delay. By then staff were telling people the "response service" was departing from, I think he said, Papakura... and could be about half an hour away.

Then at about 7.45 the staff got word from somewhere/someone that we would be moving in about 5mins.

Sure enough we did, a mostly empty train, running 45mins late headed towards Britomart.

We came to another stop just after Fruitvale Rd (the next platform on the line) where we waited another 5-10mins. An announcement came over the intercom (barely audible without the keen ears of a fox) that we had to wait for another service heading West to go past. A result of the double tracking project in New Lynn already mentioned in a previous post. Then we were off again.

Of course every platform along the Western Line was crammed full of passengers waiting for a train, and seeing as we were the first functional train they had seen in the past hour, they all expected to be picked up by us. So we duely stopped, open the doors and loaded them on. Within two stops we were full to overflowing, at which point at all stops there after, passengers were being turned away and asked to wait for the next one.

Well done Veolia!

Fortunately my boss shows understanding about these things, so my arriving to work at 8.45am was not the end of the world... I'm sure not everyone would get the same response. Overall, my commute was about 2hrs worth this morning. The staff were polite and as helpful as they could be given they were not being kept well informed.

So Mark Lambert, what do you have to say to all us Western Line passengers today? I expect you'll be very quiet today.