Most of us would welcome a long hot summer - except, of course if you are one of the thousands of train commuters left waiting at railway stations in south-east Queensland for trains that aren't going to arrive. You'd think that after spending $1.2 billion dollars to build the Moreton bay Rail Link, someone would have thought about hiring enough drivers to actually drive the trains. Apparently not.
And what confidence does this engender in the highly political fight being waged by the government over Cross River Rail?
![Moreton Bay Mayor Allan Sutherland, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk open the Moreton ...](/web/20170103133350im_/http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/t/m/k/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsal7q.png/1477402196214.jpg)
For a government happy to issue a media release about the opening of an envelope - there were no less than six media releases announcing the opening of the Moreton Bay Rail line in September and October - there was strangely not one announcement about the recruitment or training of additional train drivers to service the new line.
Moreover, perusal of the budget for the Department of Transport, which controls Queensland Rail, fails to reveal any increased allocation to QR to employ more drivers.
Maybe it just slipped their minds.
The Transport Minister, Stirling Hinchliffe, claims that he only became aware of the problem on Thursday night last week, the day before the mass cancellation of train services.
The only thing more farcical than this was the announcement QR was going to fix the problem by issuing a new timetable that took 30 trains off the tracks so the remainder could theoretically run on time!
Then the Minister made an announcement the government was going to hire 100 more train drivers, followed by a further announcement they were going to increase that number to 200.
This beggars belief. On what advice did he think 100 was the right number? Who then twisted his arm and told him it had to be 200 instead? And why would hiring them now make a jot of difference to the problem at any time in the near future?
The simple fact is that training train drivers doesn't happen overnight. It takes up to two years to be trained to be a train driver, and requires completion of a Certificate IV course with a minimum of 21 different units of study.
In Queensland it is more complicated still because QR has a policy of recruiting internally from existing train guards for driver positions. That means additional guards have to be recruited and trained as well. None of this is going to happen overnight.
Stirling Hinchliffe is not a stupid man, but he seems to have missed the bus or train on the planning of all this.
The most important thing a Minister can do is ask the important questions of their department, and when it comes to politics, the only stupid question is the one that never gets asked.
Could it be the Minister never asked if they had enough drivers to start the line on time?
On top of this, we have the political games about Cross River Rail. Jackie Trad obviously thought she could use this to score points against City Hall when she denied the Brisbane Metro project use of a bit of land at Woolloongabba.
She got a quick lesson in politics when the Prime Minister announced yesterday that $10m of preliminary Federal funding was predicated on Cross River Rail working alongside the Brisbane Metro.
Any sense of schadenfreude I have here is dented by the knowledge that with these silly games from both sides in Brisbane's transport wars, the paying public are the ones who lose out.
One thing is for certain: it looks like a long hot summer waiting for the train.
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