TRANSPORT Minister Gladys Berejiklian has slashed the number of maintenance depots from 130 to 12 to ensure workers spend their time fixing the tracks, rather than sitting around and filling out forms. 
 
Ms Berejiklian said that before the change, maintenance staff spent no more than three hours of an eight to 10-hour shift working on tracks. The Granville depot, which opened last month, is the last of the 12 new centres to begin operation.

To highlight the new efficiency, the government points to a recent example when a 33,000 volt power line failed and fell across four sets of overhead wires and tracks at St Marys at 11am on August 6.

Electrical and civil crews were dispatched from the new Blacktown maintenance base and Sydney Trains was able to restore the wiring and damaged signals in just three hours — meaning the afternoon rush hour was not disrupted for thousands of commuters.

Previously this same incident could have meant a long wait as a number of different crews — many of whom did the same job — were called in to have a look and travelled to the site from all corners of the network, resulting in an afternoon of lengthy delays for tens of thousands of travellers.

“Eight new maintenance centres of excellence and four satellite sites are now operational across the Sydney Trains network, replacing about 130 smaller, older depots that were left in a complete mess by the former Labor government,” Ms Berejiklian.

“The government committed as part of its fixing the trains reforms to overhaul Sydney Trains maintenance, and that is what we are doing.

“We are now seeing fewer incidents delaying customers, more work being done on the tracks by staff, who are also spending less time waiting around filling in forms, more organised maintenance crewing, and fewer speed restrictions across the network.”

The centres of excellence have brought together three key maintenance disciplines — electrics, civil and signals — for the first time. By eliminating duplication and waste it’s anticipated Sydney Trains maintenance crews will save one million pieces of paper over the next 12 months by ­reducing forms and red tape.

The new bases are at Blacktown, Sutherland, Sydenham, Wollongong, Gosford, Hamilton, Lawson, Hornsby, Clyde, Glenfield, CBD and Granville

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/rail-workers-forced-back-on-track-new-...

this is why Australia has been going down the gurgler...

too many bludging Rsoles who think they should get paid for a weeks work, for a day, and in that day sit around and do sweet FA...

manufacturing industries heavily Unionised are the same and the reason that they are shutting down...

Food/Holden for instance..

This is how previous governments allowed them to be structured and their are probably reasons for it to have been done this way.

I see no point in blaming employees or unions for the structures that management put is place.

Logically reducing the number of maintenance sites will mean that instead of having someone at the point of failure or close by the maint staff will be spending all their time travelling to the point of failure and trying to identify where that may be.

Employees spending too much time filling in paper work means that management are requiring too much paper work need to be filled in, again this is not the fault of employees or unions.

I suspect there is more to this than is presented in the lieberal spin that has been released.

Armchair_Politician wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2015 at 7:08am:


Quote:


Just one headline from 2012 showing how silly your comment is.

Armchair_Politician wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2015 at 6:30am:



Fool.

President Elect, The Mechanic wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2015 at 12:51pm:


700 hard working fellow Australians who deserve a lot more respect than that.

Dnarever wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2015 at 8:20pm:


I know was pretty funny watching the exchanges though