Binoculars out, lasers in: How Sydney Trains plans to stop the meltdowns

New laser devices to detect faults in overhead wiring across Sydney’s train network have been rolled out in a bid to avoid a repeat of a failure that crippled passenger services for days last year.

Coinciding with Sunday’s 100th anniversary of the first electric passenger train in Sydney, the French-made equipment is aimed at bolstering the accuracy, speed and safety of assessing potential thin-wire spots across the 1700-kilometre electrified rail network.

The roll-out of 22 laser devices is part of $423 million in measures the state government is taking following a scathing review of Sydney Trains’ handling of a meltdown of the passenger rail network, caused by an overhead wiring failure at Homebush, in May last year.

Until now, crews have had to use binoculars during visual inspections of overhead wiring, which also relied on workers’ judgment.

The binoculars used by rail staff to carry out inspections were found by the independent review to be “insufficient for the job”, and failed to detect the thin wire which led to the crippling of the rail network for several days last May.

Transport Minister John Graham said the new technology meant the chance of inspections missing a thin wire was now much smaller.

“The chance of failure with these binoculars really was much, much higher than these laser devices,” he said. “Now, it is possible to really spot the problem well before it develops.”

Graham conceded there were no guarantees that a major disruption would not happen again, “but without doing this work, we could guarantee failure”.

The main advantage of the lasers is the accuracy in detecting thin wires and the speed of inspections, which more than halved the time needed for spot measurements.

“The spot measurements before with the previous devices would often miss a thin wire,” Graham said. “This is a crucial step because it deals with exactly what happened in May.”

Since the failure last May, Sydney Trains has declared a number of critical maintenance zones, including in the Homebush-Strathfield corridor, where multiple lines converge and the failure occurred last year.

In the past six months, the passenger train operator has fixed more than 1700 defects, which compares to a target of 1557.

Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland said overhead wiring could be challenging for maintenance crews to inspect, given the extent of the rail network and the high voltages carried by the overhead wires.

“This [laser device] is absolutely accurate,” he said. “As you’re scanning the wire, it tells the operator exactly how thick the wire is. They can check particularly forking points, where two wires come together … which is where we get wear on the wire from the pantograph of the train. That was the issue that we had at Homebush. This kind of device will eliminate that kind of error.”

So far, Longland said the devices, which provided an extra layer of protection to reduce disruptions to passenger train services, had not picked up “any catastrophic issues” with overhead wiring on the network.

Figures show 92 per cent of Sydney’s suburban double-decker trains met on-time performance targets in February, compared to the same month last year, when almost one in five were late. Suburban services have reached between 91 per cent and 94 per cent on-time running for the past five months.

Under the measure, a train arriving at its final destination within five minutes of its scheduled time is considered punctual.

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