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Lobby group says city loop train breakdown symptomatic of lack of investment

The Public Transport Users Association (PTUA) says the train breakdown in the city loop on Sunday is due to a failure to invest in the rail network.

The train lost power in the tunnel between Melbourne and Parliament stations, because of a broken pantograph.

Ninety-one passengers had to wait an hour to be evacuated.

The MFB’s Dominic Scarfe says they helped evacuate the passengers, many of whom were elderly.

“It probably took us 10 minutes 15 minutes to get the power disconnected before any crews went in,” he said.

“But once everything was safe it all moved quite smoothly.”

Trips on the Frankston and Sandringham lines were interrupted.

The fault also caused another train in the loop to stop.

The president of the PTUA Tony Morton says it is the first time a train has broken down in the loop but faults with equipment are a regular occurrence.

“It’s becoming more and more frequent for entire train lines carrying tens of thousands of people to basically fall over in a heap for hours at time,” he said.

“We’ve seen it happen on a number of train lines in Melbourne.

Mr Morton says the network has been neglected.

“It’s symptomatic of a systematic failure to invest in maintaining the train network and in particular the track side infrastructure on our train system,” he said.

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