‘They can barely handle the everyday rush’: The charts showing how your Sydney train line performs

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Lighting technician Jaime Petersen was heading home from a long day preparing a show for this year’s Vivid festival when a rogue wire 20 kilometres down the tracks turned her commute into “three hours of hell”.

This year’s festival drew almost 200,000 visitors on a single night, but the crowd she encountered at Circular Quay station during that now-infamous meltdown in May was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

Jaime Petersen says she avoids catching the train if she sees delays anywhere on the network after getting caught up in May’s commuter chaos.

“It feels like Sydney Trains can barely handle the everyday rush as it is, let alone when something goes wrong,” she said. “I was amazed that there were no instances of people accidentally falling onto the tracks … it was just so crowded.”

Petersen was one of thousands whose commutes turned to chaos when a single train became entangled in loose overhead wiring near Homebush.

An independent review into the episode released on Tuesday found Sydney Trains’ response to the incident was inadequate, and it took “far too long” for the network to recover two days later.

But the review identified problems plaguing the system before May’s commuter chaos. These include a growing number of “high-priority defects”, which reached a record high of 4450 in August, and gradual declines in the number of trains across the suburban network reaching their destinations on time.

The T1 North Shore & Western, T2 Inner West & Leppington, T3 Bankstown or Liverpool & Inner West (from 2024) and T9 Northern lines all failed to meet punctuality targets last year, Herald analysis of daily morning peak hour data since 2018 reveals.

Sydney Trains’ punctuality target is at least 92 per cent of peak services arriving at their final destination in the CBD within five minutes of the timetable. The T8 Airport & South line was the most reliable, arriving in the Sydney CBD between 6am and 10am, within five minutes of schedule more than 95 per cent of the time last year.

The least reliable three-month stretches on suburban lines were in 2022 and 2023, a period marked by more than 500 protected industrial actions that resulted in no trains on any lines entering the city during the morning peak meeting punctuality standards.

The largest and most consistent reliability declines since 2018 were on the North Shore and Western line, the Northern line as well as the Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra line.

Sydney’s train network “struggled to meet defined service delivery targets since the introduction of the 2017 timetable”, a December 2023 review found.

The data since late 2024 indicates that most suburban lines have improved their reliability, partly helped by the Fleet Repair Plan that commenced in June last year.

Passenger illness, severe weather, signal problems, anti-social behaviour and overcrowding can all impact the punctuality of trains.

Reliability on Petersen’s line, the T2 Inner West and Leppington, was dramatically affected during industrial action in 2022, dropping as low as 77 per cent of trains running within five minutes of their scheduled arrival time. It has recovered since but incidents as recently as this month have continued to drag down the average.

Since the May incident, Petersen said she no longer feels she can count on Sydney’s train network to get her to where she needs to go.

“As soon as I see that there are delays starting to happen, I immediately just default to driving,” she said. “Even if the delay is only four minutes, I don’t want to risk that snowballing.”