AUSTRALIA: A steel cable holding the Sydney Trains overhead wiring taut snapped at Chatswood on Monday night, the operator says; repairs finished about 1pm Tuesday, but T1 and T9 gaps continued.

Sydney Trains service at Chatswood station beneath overhead wiring
Sydney Trains service at Chatswood station. Illustrative photo. Photo: John Robert McPherson, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sydney Trains runs the city’s suburban heavy-rail network, and Transport for NSW, the state transport authority, completed the repair. T1 is the North Shore & Western Line and T9 is the Northern Line; both run through Chatswood.

What broke, and why it stopped trains

The cable that failed was not the wire that feeds electricity to trains. Sydney Trains says it was a support cable carrying counterweights — heavy weights that pull the overhead contact wire taut.

The operator says the cable snapped at about 8:30pm on Monday, and three empty trains came to a stop. With the counterweights no longer holding the line, the wire sagged, which Sydney Trains says made it unsafe to run trains through the affected area.

Why the delays outlasted the repair

Transport for NSW completed the repair at about 1pm on Tuesday. Fixing the hardware, however, is not the same as restoring the timetable.

Sydney Trains said service gaps could continue while trains and crews were repositioned. Just after 4pm, delays and service gaps on T1 and T9 were still being reported.

The North Shore stretch around Chatswood and Gordon was the worst affected, with replacement buses running toward the city.

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A second wiring failure in 11 days

The breakdown came 11 days after an overhead-wiring failure at Redfern/Erskineville on August 14. Sydney Trains chief executive Matthew Longland said the two were unrelated and involved different components. That is the operator’s assessment.

The Electrical Trades Union of NSW said staffing shortages could be relevant, and that 23 of 90 funded overhead roles were vacant. That is the union’s assertion, made ahead of any engineering finding.

Longland has requested an engineering report, to be followed by a review of maintenance records and of investment in asset renewal. Both remain pending.

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