By Anna Patty and Jacob Saulwick
Another 690 jobs will be cut from RailCorp in the latest changes to Sydney's train system.
But the cuts will not affect the number of drivers, guards or station staff, Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, said at a press conference on Friday morning.
Job cuts ... RailCorp are to cut 690 jobs.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Fairfax Media also obtained a high-level RailCorp document which sheds more light on the large-scale plan to abolish the position of station managers and other rail staff, raising questions about the future safety of services.
The internal RailCorp document which is labelled commercial in confidence targets station managers, saying their role will no longer exist as part of a major staff restructure.
A spokesman for Ms Berejiklian said many roles would be redefined and people would be transferred to new jobs.
Safety and risk related positions are also among those “roles” which the draft document says will no longer exist.
Under the heading of “transition pathways to the new organisation”, the list of staff positions to be reduced include risk analysts, customer support officers and train crew support staff.
The document also suggests the role of drug and alcohol testing investigators and auditors will not exist under the restructure.
Other positions targeted under the plan, which is a live working document, for the government includes regional crew managers, depot managers and network superintendents.
From July next year, RailCorp will be dissolved and replaced by two new organisations, Sydney Trains and NSW Trains.
At Friday's press conference Ms Berejiklian said 240 positions will be cut as a result of the new organisations - about half from middle management and half from other parts of the organisation.
The cuts come on top of 750 middle management redundancies already announced.
Another 450 maintenance positions, of 4700, will be cut in the next three years.
Ms Berejiklian said the number of station staff on the network today would be retained.
But she said more station staff would be on platforms and not behind desks preparing paperwork.
Asked if smaller stations would lose staff, Ms Berejiklian said: "Every station that has staff today will have staff from 1 July."
She later added: "I anticipate at some stations there will potentially be one extra staff person and at some stations there could be potentially one less staff person, but I don't anticipate changes to be more than that."
Ms Berejiklian said she had briefed staff on Friday morning on the changes and received an ‘‘extremely positive’’ response.
The reforms will involve giving frontline staff more power to monitor safety issues and minor disruptions on the network.
There are about 160 minor incidents at day on the CityRail network, the minister said, and more of these will be able to be fixed by station staff, rather than by dedicated response teams.
‘‘This is not a new thing; it used to happen years ago,’’ Ms Berejiklian said.
Of the 240 redundancies announced on Wednesday, about half will come from middle-management, and half will come from incident management teams and drug and alcohol testing. Drug and alcohol testing will be out-sourced.
A safety expert, the former chief executive of the NSW Independent Transport Safety and Reliability Regulator, Carolyn Walsh, had overseen the reforms to ensure that safety would not be compromised.
The minister said reforms to maintenance could, over three years, reduce the amount of weekend trackwork.
Every weekend at least one line on the CityRail network is closed for trackwork, and Ms Berejiklian said some of this work might be able to be done ‘‘in the middle of the night when there are no trains running for example.’’
‘‘We simply have to make this better,’’ she said.
Some maintenance workers were being rostered on to eight hour shifts, but only working three hours,’’ she said.