V/Line says it will pursue Telstra for hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the outage wiping out the vast majority of its train services on Wednesday and on Thursday morning.
Almost all regional travel across Victoria was suspended on Wednesday, with limited bus services throughout the day and commuters eventually were told to “make your own way home”.
V/Line also confirmed at 6pm there would not be any services during peak hour on Thursday morning.
A line of stranded commuters desperate to catch a bus home stretched for several hundred metres at Southern Cross train station on Wednesday evening.
But they were told to “make your own way home” as they ran out of coaches and experienced delays of up to three hours.
“What are we meant to do? Start walking up the Hume Highway,” one fed-up customer said.
V/Line chief executive Will Tieppo said Telstra’s outage left the train network “blind” and it could not communicate with trains from the control room.
While he was unable to give an exact figure, Mr Tieppo said the interruption had likely cost V/Line “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, with the company to explore whether Telstra could be held liable.
Services on the Bendigo, Seymour, Gippsland, Geelong and Ballarat lines were affected. Mr Tieppo said 100 of the company’s 178 trains were active when the outage happened. Trains had to stop immediately at the nearest station while three were stuck in between stations and had to slowly travel to the nearest platform.
Mr Tieppo said the V/Line network required mobile coverage to operate, and that any back-up arrangements – or lack thereof – were entirely in the hands of Telstra.
“We heavily rely on the telco network to provide the resilience and the back-up systems to provide telecommunications for us,” he said.
“That’s something we’ll investigate together with our national partners, because it’s not only us in Victoria – other national rail operators have encountered the same issue.
“We’ll look at investigating what happened in the background and why there wasn’t a back-up by Telstra to provide the communications that we needed.”
Mr Tieppo said whether Telstra remained V/Line’s contracted telco was beyond his authority, because the agreement sat at a national level.
“The national contract is actually between the Australian Rail Track Corporation and Telstra,” he said.
“We’ll be working together with ARTC to understand how to ensure this doesn’t happen again and how to work with Telstra to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
A statement released on Wednesday night urged passengers to “defer travel until further notice”.
“We thank passengers for their patience and understanding,” it said.
“We are working to restore services as soon as possible (on Thursday).”
Mr Tieppo confirmed affected travellers would be able to apply for compensation.
Passengers stranded on platforms across Victoria
Ballarat commuters were left stranded without trains or replacement buses heading into Melbourne on Wednesday morning.
Melbourne worker Ky Kearin waited at the station in limbo.
He said the outage was “annoying” and “difficult”.
Steve Carter was unable to get into the city for a school reunion.
“In another six months we’ll have another one,” he said.
Having worked in aviation, he said he understood how the outage would have had a “huge impact”.
“My phone wasn’t working so I watched the news and it became apparent that the system was down.
“My wife’s waiting over in the car so I’ll probably go have a coffee”.
“There’s going to be 1000 people jumping into cars and driving down to Melbourne now, I presume.
“I’m not fussed, but it is disappointing.”
Another man at the station said he was trying to get to Melbourne for a job interview.
Gippsland commuters took to social media to vent their anger over this morning’s train chaos.
“Do the trains to Gippsland ever run for more than three to four days before it’s back on the bus?? Steam in 1950 was more reliable,” one spokesperson said.
Another sarcastically added: “Has anyone ever got to Melbourne by train? Curious”.
A third said: “We must have the best maintained rail system in the world for they are always doing maintenance … or is it that the system is hopeless? Hmm …”
Others said repeated failures were undermining confidence in public transport, with one commuter saying it’s “hard to get people to convert to public transport when this keeps happening”.
For many regional commuters, Wednesday’s shutdown hasn’t just been a one-off outage, its been yet another blow on a line where patience is already wearing thin.
Transport Victoria said its signals team was monitoring conditions and adjusting traffic lights to assist replacement buses. Authorities are advising motorists to be aware of increased pedestrian and bus activity around V/Line stations.
Metro Trains services remain largely unaffected.