Hillside Trains: The first 48 hours

[Jennifer Richmond <richmond@melbpc.org.au>]

G'day!
MTE have been in control of Hillside trains for over 48 hours now. They
have redone every roster for customer services roles (CSEs and Station
Staff) an I think that they have done a very good job. On my line
(Epping), a lot of unnecessary management was cut out (some SMs, the
Administrative assistant and the Stations Manager). These SMs were not
fired, but given a position as Station Officer, meaning that they are
paid less, for doing less but still keep the same hours of work, serving
the customer, instead of doing administrative work.

The Reason for axing the SM jobs was that there were simply too many.
Having 2 SMs on duty at Reservoir at once was ridiculous! If the new
company finds that the workload on one SM is too much, they can just
re-promote one of the former SMs, who are now an SO.

I think that the move too less management and more ground staff in
fantastic and that it will cut down on red tape and improve customer
service.

As predicted by some posters to this NG, Hell has not boiled over,
trains are running more on time (some even had to stop for several
minutes "waiting time" at my station yesterday!), there were no more
cancellations/delays than normal and things generally ran smoothly.

I think that we are entering an exciting time in Melbourne's public
transport development and that we will start to see an increase in
passengers and services. These new companies not only have a
responsibility to run transport services as the government did, it's
their business!

Spoken and authorised by Sam Eades on behalf of himself, Melbourne.