NSW train commuters face further disruption on Wednesday as services are cancelled while the rail union continues long running industrial action.
Services will not run on the T4 Eastern and Illawarra line and South Coast line.
Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland said about 70,000 people would typically travel those lines on a regular Wednesday.
He also expects the network to be impacted for several hours either side of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union’s planned area-based strike between 10am and 4pm.
Mr Longland said timetables could be impacted from 6am but should return to normal by 8pm.
“To ensure the safety of our customers, staff, and network overall, trains will need to be taken back to stabling yards and depots before the industrial action starts,” he said on Tuesday.
RTBU secretary Alex Claassens says the train services should not have been suspended, with about 90 per cent of train crews still available to work.
“If it is shut down, it will be because Transport bureaucrats have simply decided they don’t want to run the trains, not because they can’t,” he said on Monday.
He said the union action was designed so that services could continue, and they intended for it to cause headaches for management and the government, not commuters.
Transport for NSW said late on Tuesday it was working with the union on a potential plan to possibly run services on the line hourly with limited stops.
“That will be dependent on the number of trains that are available and staff that are willing to work during the stop work period,” TfNSW said in a statement.
The union is seeking to secure changes to a new fleet of intercity trains and reach a new enterprise bargaining agreement.
The new trains, which the union says are not currently safe, have been sitting in storage since 2019 and the previous enterprise agreement expired more than a year ago.
Three more area-based strikes are planned before the end of the month, and workers will also leave station gates open and refuse to operate foreign-built trains on some days.
The union is also banning work associated with the Sydney Metro transit project until September 10.
