The Nationals Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, wants an immediate meeting with Victorian Transport Minister Gabrielle Williams following news a passenger fell from a V/Line train at Pyramid Hill.
Mr Walsh says V/Line – and the Allan Labor government – have kept the latest failure on the Swan Hill line under wraps for weeks “and that’s inexcusable”
Particularly, he says, because the government has just about run out of excuses for its total mismanagement of the regional rail network.
“The government has not been able to get the Swan Hill train to run on time, even assuming it is a train and not a bus, for years,” Mr Walsh says.
“Then the Swan Hill train lost a carriage with passengers in it, and now it has put passenger safety at risk,” he says.
“From the little information which has, finally, been released, we are led to believe the passenger fell from the Swan Hill train at Pyramid Hill, a station where the train is longer than the platform.
“As usual the government is hiding behind the no comment stand, claiming there is an ongoing investigation. If this accident happened in August that means the investigation has been going on for weeks – it can’t take that long to find out why this man fell.?”
Mr Walsh says the man then had to be dragged back onto the train because there was no ambulance available; “and carried a further 30 or 40 painful minutes along the line to Kerang for treatment”.
He says as if this latest V/Line mess wasn’t enough to try and cover up, it has also again highlighted challenges faced in regional and rural Victoria because no ambulance was available.
The Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator has said its initial probe will assess whether there are immediate safety concerns for the network and if risk controls by operators were effective.
“In this case the government and V/Line know the platform is short, so why do doors, which lead to nothing, open at all?” Mr Walsh says.
“Even assuming the short announcements by conductors are made, you cannot assume they were either heard or understood, so why not keep the doors locked where there is no platform – it is so blindingly obvious to me,” he says.
“If you are an occasional, or once-only, user of the line, you would not know about the short platform, if you were a tourist or migrant worker, you probably would not understand the message and just assume it was an arrival announcement.
“But I don’t want to see this used as an excuse for trains to stop at fewer stations along the line – we need to get it right, not make it worse by doing less, or nothing.
“That’s why I want a sit down with the Minister, I want to know what positive steps are going to be taken to minimise all these risks and when this government will finally govern for the whole state, not just Melbourne, and invest in regional services.
