The heroes this city needs

Traintastrophe! KiwiDeRail! Transdevastation! Yesterday morning, Wellington commuters woke up to the news that the damage caused by a derailment meant all the Wellington lines except Johnsonville were out of action for the morning commute. Train commuters hopped in their cars and joined the morning rush into town.

‘‘Traffic towards Wellington at a standstill,’’ said someone on Neighbourly about 7.30am. The trip in from Paraparaumu was estimated to be two hours long. I can almost get to Palmy in that time. Other places didn’t seem so bad. Some motorists found Nga¯ u¯ ranga Gorge no problem, and Jenny from Tawa reckoned traffic into town was fine.

After Metlink said there would be no bus replacements, some charter buses were rustled up at short notice. With Dunkirk-like resourcefulness, even a London-style double-decker – of the type normally used for stag parties and school balls – was drafted into action.

The media did their bit. People were asked to carpool or pick up people who couldn’t get into work. Kind-hearted folk with empty cars dropped into railway stations to pick up stranded commuters.

Many people, according to some workplaces, simply didn’t bother to show up for work. Can you blame them?

So, what caused some freight wagons to derail and then keep going for 200 metres though eight points, or track intersections, damaging rails and sleepers, and causing access to four different lines to be cut off? We won’t know for sure until KiwiRail finishes its inquiry.

The incident apparently happened in the same place as another seven or eight years ago. Could it be a maintenance or track problem? Though the present Government has heavily invested in KiwiRail, trying to turn around Wellington’s antiquated rail infrastructure is like trying to stop a freight train with derailed wagons ploughing through eight points with just an electric scooter to help you.

The cause could also have been driver error. If this is the case, rather than just blaming the driver, I hope KiwiRail will examine its driver training, as well as the timetables and shifts of its freight services. We know the reason for many truck accidents is because the poor drivers are so often under pressure from employers to go faster.

Or it just might have been a genuine accident, in which case we need to ask why a random accident can cause 20,000 commuters to be unable to travel to work the next morning. Thinking in the longer term, is it a good idea to have passenger and freight trains operating cheek by jowl?

Torrential rain in the afternoon made the trip home daunting for some commuters, yet by midafternoon Metlink announced a limited number of train services would be running that evening.

So did any good come out of the debacle? This won’t be of much comfort to disgruntled passengers, but every time the train system breaks down, the resulting road chaos reminds motorists what life would be like without public transport. Pump more money into trains and get more commuters on board, and we’ll free up road space for tradies and others who must use their cars.

It’s also not a good wake-up call for what might happen in a disaster. One of the lessons of the Christchurch earthquake was that resilience is not just about having water in your garden shed. It’s also about people communicating with each other and helping the vulnerable.

To all those people who organised carpooling, picked up stranded commuters or asked at work if anyone needed a lift home, good on you, you’re the sort of person this city needs in the time of a major disaster.