Services on parts of major Melbourne train lines are suspended causing commuter headaches for many in the city’s south-east after vandals severed nearly 400 cables.

The Cranbourne and Pakenham train lines and V/Line services on the Gippsland line were suspended from their first morning services on Tuesday and transport authorities said they are hoping to get them back online by the evening.

Vandals took out the whole signalling network for the corridor when they cut the cables.Credit:Simon Schluter

The vandals struck about 1am, cutting through about 390 cables near Sandown Park and, according to Department of Transport head of transport services Nick Foa, “knocking out the entire signalling system” and other communication equipment in the rail corridor.

The disruption to the train network occurred after COVID-19 restrictions were eased on Friday, including the scrapping of the mask mandate in offices and the ditching of a public health recommendation for Victorians to work from home.

“It’s completely unacceptable; a complete waste of resources and waste of people’s time who are trying to do the right thing and travel back to the CBD,” Mr Foa said on Tuesday.

“We can see the CBD stations are much busier today, and yesterday we saw a 30 per cent week-on-week uptick in people coming back to the CBD of Melbourne.

“What we’ve provided is 50 extra trains on that [Cranbourne] line per week … so it’s quite ironic that the vandals … have targeted the most recently upgraded line for personal gain, or whatever reasons they’ve targeted it for.

“They’ve thrown the travel journeys of those commuters into chaos.”

Buses replaced trains between Caulfield and Dandenong on the Cranbourne and Pakenham lines from the early hours of Tuesday, but by about 1.50pm, the buses were replacing trains between Oakleigh and Dandenong.

Coaches were replacing Gippsland V/Line services between Southern Cross and Traralgon and Bairnsdale. Passengers were earlier advised to allow an extra 60 minutes for their journey home.

Metro Trains Melbourne chief Raymond O’Flaherty described the vandalism as “senseless”, and said authorities would not tolerate such criminal behaviour on the network.

He said Metro was working closely with Victoria Police to track the people responsible down and bring them to justice. “We have a good track record in recent years of capturing other vandals who have performed similar acts,” he said.

“I do apologise to passengers.

“This is the week that we want everything to go well as more and more people are coming back to the city.

Mr O’Flaherty said he was taken aback at the “brazen” nature of the attack on the network.

Our Breaking News Alert will notify you of significant breaking news when it happens. Get it here.

Most Viewed in National

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article