The boss of Metrolink has apologised after passengers have faced four days of disruption. It comes after an overhead line came down near Victoria station at 'the worst possible time' on Sunday (June 11), while festival goers were partying at Parklife and football fans prepared for Soccer Aid at Old Trafford.
Engineers have since been working around the clock to restore full service on the Bury and Rochdale lines, but the problem has not been easy to fix. With hopes that services could finally be running back as normal tomorrow morning (Thursday), head of Metrolink Danny Vaughan told the Manchester Evening News he is 'very sorry' to passengers who have faced disruption.
"It has been a very, very complicated repair, which we're not quite through yet," he said. "But we're aiming to get a full service back up on Thursday morning.
Join our WhatsApp Top Stories and Breaking News group by clicking this link
"It is not the norm. I'm pretty confident that we've done works last year and this year which will see reliability grow and our reliability performance numbers do prove that this is not the norm, but I definitely apologise to passengers who have been affected this week."
Parklife organisers had planned for the event to take place with no trams running at all, with industrial action expected to take place on the same weekend. It meant that additional buses were put on to take partygoers away from Heaton Park, with 160 buses in use rather than 120 as normal, even following the late decision to call off the Metrolink staff strike.
Mr Vaughan admits the decision to use extra buses was 'very fortunate' given the carnage unfolding near Victoria station, and meant that transport bosses received 'very few complaints' from people attending Parklife. He said: "We normally carry 20,000 people to and from the event, both on Saturday and Sunday
"We painstakingly planned for weeks and months to cater for the demand, but unfortunately when something like this happens it's pretty devastating to us, and we would apologise to passengers. But what we did manage to do was get good information out there quickly along with the event organisers."
The problem which engineers have been getting to grips with for four days began when components on the overhead line near Victoria 'tangled themselves' around the pantograph on top of a tram. As the tram moved on, it pulled 'huge amounts' of the overhead structure down, leaving a 'complex' rebuild job.
"It was pretty catastrophic," said Mr Vaughan. "We have one engineer who has worked for Metrolink for 30 years and he said he's never seen a situation as bad with the overhead line. It's obviously a very complicated piece of engineering."
The problem for engineers has been made worse by the location of the fault near Victoria station, next to the Network Rail line, while certain items have had to be rebuilt - with objects such as poles becoming damaged as the overhead lines came down. "It's a really complex place and I really feel for the staff, they've been flat out since Sunday trying to get the thing fixed," said Mr Vaughan.
"Overhead line failures aren't that uncommon on Metrolink, but we're usually used to fixing them within five to six hours, or else overnight. This one has taken three days, and that just shows the level of complexity."
The cause of the issue is not currently known, but Metrolink bosses don't believe it was because of the recent hot weather, with the line designed to work in changing temperatures well beyond 30C. Subject to testing, Mr Vaughan is 'pretty confident' services will be able to travel to Victoria again by tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, bus replacement services are running between Piccadilly and Abraham Moss for the Bury line, and Piccadilly and Monsall for the Rochdale line. Further details are available on the Transport for Greater Manchester website.
READ NEXT:
