Power Failure: All Trains Stop

Following hot on the heels of Monday's rant comes a major failure of the Auckland rail network. However, today's failure could not have been prevented and there was no way to run trains anywhere.

Unfortunately, today's outage sounded like a very serious one - a power failure at Wellington's Network Control Centre, responsible for controlling the rail networks in Auckland and nationwide, resulted in all signals and radios in Auckland to be knocked offline. With no signals trains have no way of knowing whether the track ahead is clear or otherwise safe to proceed (and level crossing alarms may stop working), and without radios not even verbal permission to pass signals can be given, bringing the entire network to its knees. The failure occurred around 4:10pm and Auckland Transport's Twitter feed immediately sprung into action, informing commuters to arrange alternative transport. Various buses accepted rail tickets to aid with the extra loads. Limited services on the Eastern Line resumed around 5:15, when I observed a busy train departing Britomart for Otahuhu. I then boarded a train bound for Papakura, which I assume was the first to arrive at the station in an hour; of course the train was very full.

No trains moving anywhere: the tunnel was empty

Crowds of people disembark the first train to arrive at Papakura in an hour

In terms of what went wrong, unfortunately this is something no amount of extra rail lines, redundancies or service improvements will ever help with. No mayor will be able to come up with a project to avoid this. The Network Control Centre has 2, sometimes 3, unrelated links between all the various components in order to avoid exactly this. For the entire network to be brought to its knees would possibly mean a very complex failure, but would happen incredibly rarely (perhaps once every 5 years or so).

No doubt many commuters will try and blame Veolia for this problem, however of course there is absolutely no way they could have caused this. The blame lies not with Veolia, not with Auckland Transport, and perhaps not even with KiwiRail. It's also certain the media will use this and try and spin it against rail (already they've talked about the Rugby World Cup incident, which was caused by overcrowding) - yet this would be unjustified as major faults like this can occur both on rail and on the road.

Until the exact cause is determined, we can only assume this was a very unfortunate accident.

UPDATE: It appears as if a very localised power outage had affected the Auckland room, and the backup systems that had worked during tests had not kicked in. A KiwiRail team are now working day and night to identify what went wrong.

UPDATE 2: KiwiRail have identified the cause of the problem as a faulty uninterrupted power supply (UPS), and immediately began removing the UPS from service and installing a replacement. Further work to ensure the control centre's robustness is under way this week.