Potential disruptions this Tuesday.

Melbourne’s Metro service has changed a lot over thepast two years. With 38 new trains increasing our fleet to 203 and 1,484 new services bringing total services per week to 14,353, we now have a Metro service departing somewhere across Melbourne every 30 seconds, everyday. This is all part of our journey to change from being a traditional suburban railway into a high capacity metro-style service the likes of which customers experience in London, New York and Hong Kong.
To date, good progress has been made to effect these changes. But change isn’t always easy.

Notification of work bans from unions

Negotiations with unions representing Infrastructure maintenance employees have been ongoing for many weeks.

While a fair and affordable agreement was reached in early July with unions representing 2,700 of our 4,100 employees,
including our drivers and station staff, we have yet to be able to reach a similar agreement with unions representing 700 infrastructure maintenance employees.

The infrastructure unions have notified us of their intent to undertake protected industrial action to progress their claims and this includes a number of stop work meetings on Tuesday 21 August.

These claims are effectively seeking to keep things the way they are – no change. But with a much busier railway, we need to shift when it is that we do maintenance and therefore a change to more flexible rostering is essential.

In the event of disruption

While we have received assurances from unions that industrial action will avoid disrupting day-to-day railway operations a fault on the network could affect services on one or more lines.

At this stage, we expect business as usual on Tuesday.

Our drivers, station staff, signallers, authorised officers and operations centre will all be on duty during this time to keep
you informed every step of the way.

For customers with smartphones, please bookmark our new mobile website at metrotrains.com.au so we can keep you
up-to-date on any disruptions should they occur.

To finish

We apologise in advance for any disruption. For us to build a metro service to support Australia’s fastest growing and most liveable city, there is only one certainty…we must continue to change.