Queensland Rail fail: Train driver overhaul declared complete due to ‘intent’

A report card on Queensland Rail’s train crew rostering overhaul has a curious definition of “mission accomplished”.

A “RAIL fail” report card declared a major train crew rostering overhaul had been completed because the “intent” of the project had been delivered.

It’s the second time in a year the State Government’s Citytrain Response Unit marked recommendations to fix the trains as having been completed when they had either been partially delivered or not at all.

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The Government set up the Citytrain Response Unit in January 2017 to independently monitor the implementation of 36 recommendations of the Strachan inquiry into the train driver shortage that forced hundreds of service cancellations.

The network’s timetable is yet to be fully restored by Queensland Rail following the October 2016, meltdown and no firm date has been given for the recovery.

In the unit’s last progress report to the Government in June, it declared QR had completed a recommendation to accelerate the implementation of a new rostering system to more effectively avoid train service disruptions by being able to better forecast any issues under complex work rules and allocate train crew.

It involved installing a $5.8 million HASTUS computer program to replace a more than decade-old system described as “manually laborious and open to operator error”.

But the computer program is yet to be fully installed despite the tender being awarded in late 2015. The program kicked off as early as 2009.

The network’s timetable is yet to be fully restored following the October 2016.

The Strachan inquiry recommended in early 2017 to accelerate the project, finding it fed into the rail crisis as QR relied on external providers to model the impact of crewing rules.

It said the project was targeting completion in 2017-18.

But project sources have told The Courier-Mail the software was yet to be fully rolled out, was running years late and was currently unable to be used for daily or weekly rostering of train crew.

It is understood the program is only being used to create the master roster in Queensland rather than overseas, but it currently has not been implemented to allocate train crews on a daily basis.

A QR spokeswoman said phase one was being used to develop master rosters and phase two would begin in February, and “enable us to achieve additional benefits and operation efficiencies”.

An unidentified spokesman for the Citytrain Response Unit, in a statement, said the rostering system recommendation was closed in 2017 as the “intent ..was fully delivered”.

It said QR had completed the recommendation as it no longer relied on external modelling of the impact of crewing rules after the delivery of phase one of the project.

The unit has previously come under attack from the State Opposition for approving a recommendation to recruit train drivers externally, despite not a single candidate being appointed from outside QR.