A sign at Wellington Railway Station saying services are disrupted due to industrial action on 18 September 2024. Photo: RNZ / Ruth Hill
First person - 7.27pm on platform 10 at Wellington Railway Station.
It's the third or fourth - I lost track - day of industrial action on Wellington's trains. It's Friday, an average blustery and coolish early spring night, in an uncertain queue for the bus replacement out to the Hutt Valley.
In front of me, in the fractured queue, are a couple of women with two toddlers, and a boy of maybe 6. They, like everyone else, keep casting their heads and gaze around, from bus to bus, on the platform, wondering what is going on.
The trains have mostly been running, but sometimes not. Earlier, on Tuesday I think it was, I got to the Ava platform at 7.15am just in case, for the 7.32am train. The electronic sign, in attractive pink, said the train after that was on reduced capacity, six not eight carriages. When the 7.32am had not shown up by 7.40am, I walked home, and did my radio cross from there.
By Friday, commuters like me were getting more used to randomness. But here, on the Friday evening platform, it reached a new level. I had got there early, hoping the 7.35pm train was on. No. Bus it was. At the front of the queue, I was less anxious than those at the back.
As we shuffled from foot to foot, a white bus pulled up, parked, sat running. A second smaller blue coach pulled in behind. Where were they going? Neither had any sign on them. We were left none the wiser.
Drivers got out, smiled, walked by. No one official was on the platform.
A double-decker Metlink bus, all in green, pulled by. 'NIS' read the sign - 'Not in Service'. Then, a second double-decker. But they pulled past the queue. Everyone's brows wrinkled a little more. The toddlers squirmed in their mum's arms. The anxiety ratcheted up a notch. Would it just be the much smaller white and blue buses? Would there be room?
There was no one to ask.
The managers who, presumably, knew what was going on, were not on the platform. Two people in blue Metlink jerseys sat in buses, on their devices. There were no signs on the buses, to correspond with the signs on poles at the start of the queues.
Commuters everywhere know this experience. You wait. You wonder. If Metlink had thought to put a manager on the platform, what a relief that could have been. They had been apologising, online, and on the tinny tannoy on the Wellington station platform, for days about the disrupted service.
Though as one commuter at least said, along the lines of, if the workers are taking action then the disruption is down to both sides, not just one.
But the managers did not think they should stand on the platform at 7.27pm on Friday night, to assuage the anxiety, and cool the press of people just hoping to get home on this bus, and not have to wait another half-hour for another.
If you are never in the queue, you really have no idea.
