Just after 2.30pm on 20 May 2025, a Waratah train pulled out of Homebush station and its overhead power line came down, damaging two other trains. Three hundred passengers sat in darkened carriages for close to three hours before Sydney Trains finished getting them off. The fault at one substation then cascaded across the network for two days, stranding commuters on lines with nothing physically wrong with them, because the crews and control systems needed to recover were themselves stretched thin. An independent review commissioned afterwards found the wire that failed had been flagged as a risk back in 2020 — and had simply never been entered into Sydney Trains' own system for tracking defects (Independent Rail Review, Transport for NSW, 29-Aug-2025).
Homebush was not a one-off. It was the latest entry in a run of meltdowns, strikes and near-strikes that has defined rail in New South Wales since Chris Minns's Labor government took office in March 2023 — a period bookended by a punishing pay dispute with the union that runs the trains and a maintenance backlog decades in the making. What belongs to this government, what it inherited, and what it merely allowed to continue is the question this piece answers.
What the government did
Minns went to the 2023 election promising to abolish the former Coalition government's public sector wages cap, which had held pay rises at 2.5–3% since 2011 regardless of inflation. In office his government moved quickly: the Industrial Relations Amendment Act 2023 passed on 30 November 2023, repealing the cap and replacing it with a new bargaining framework, backed by a $3.6 billion Essential Services Fund to help agencies pay for the settlements that followed (NSW Government media releases, Sep–Nov-2023). On rail specifically, it also moved on reliability: within months of taking office it commissioned the Sydney Trains Review, whose interim findings — that a large maintenance backlog had left equipment uninspected and unrepaired because crews lacked track access — prompted a $97 million Sydney Rail Repair Plan of round-the-clock weekend trackwork from June 2023 (Sydney Trains Review, Final Report, Transport for NSW, 12-Dec-2023).
The repair blitz worked, on the government's own measure: the seven months to March 2024 produced the network's best average peak on-time running since 2021 (Sydney Trains Review, Final Report; Transport for NSW performance reports). But that early win ran into a much longer fight. On 15 April 2024 the Combined Rail Unions — led by the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU), covering roughly 8,000 Sydney and NSW Trains employees — lodged a log of claims for a new enterprise agreement, with the previous agreement's nominal expiry on 1 May 2024 (RTBU log of claims, 15-Apr-2024; Enterprise Agreement AG2023/240, Fair Work Commission). Bargaining opened on 31 May 2024 and did not go well: the government's opening offer, reported at 9.5% over three years, sat far short of the unions' claim, reported at up to 32% over four years (approx.; contemporaneous coverage, mid-2024).
The dispute that stopped the trains
What followed was more than a year of protected industrial action, on and off, that turned Sydney's rail network into a rolling news story. In August 2024 RTBU and CEPU members voted overwhelmingly for strikes of up to 24 hours; the first wave hit on 18 September 2024, cancelling and delaying hundreds of services before the union called it off within the week, after the government agreed to a free-travel weekend and fresh talks (TfNSW travel alerts, Sep-2024). Action resumed from 20 November 2024, this time targeting the intercity network — Newcastle, the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, the Southern Highlands and the Illawarra all lost services to reduced-timetable bans (TfNSW travel alert, Nov-2024). By December, Premier Minns said he was "drawing a line in the sand" and asked the Fair Work Commission to suspend the action. A further round of "go-slow" bans began on 14 February 2025 despite scheduled negotiations, and the Commission suspended protected industrial action for the proposed agreement until 1 July 2025 ([2025] FWCFB 46, Fair Work Commission, Feb-2025).
The dispute finally ended on 30 May 2025, when the government and the Combined Rail Unions reached an in-principle enterprise agreement: a 12% nominal pay rise over three years — roughly 4% a year — plus back pay to May 2024, when the old agreement had expired (NSW Government ministerial release, 30-May-2025). Transport Minister John Graham said the deal would "bring relief to the disruption ... a million daily rail commuters have been forced to endure"; RTBU NSW secretary Toby Warnes called it "a historic enterprise agreement" after "a long and difficult dispute." Thirteen months elapsed between the log of claims and the signed deal, during which a network carrying more than a million trips a day was never fully free of the risk of disruption.
The strongest case
Real wages, real safety concerns, and a network this government did not build
Put the RTBU's case at its strongest and it has two legs. The first is pay: the wages cap the union spent a decade fighting held rises to 2.5–3% a year through a period when national inflation peaked above 7% in late 2022 — a real-terms cut the Minns government itself campaigned against and legislated to end (Industrial Relations Amendment Act 2023, Nov-2023). A union pushing hard in its first uncapped bargaining round in over a decade was doing exactly what the removal of the cap was designed to let it do. The second leg is safety, and it is harder to dismiss as pure industrial muscle. The New Intercity Fleet (Mariyung) — ordered years earlier by the former Coalition government and delivered late — relies on CCTV rather than a guard physically watching the platform edge before departure, and routes passenger duress alarms to a remote call centre rather than the driver or guard on board; the Federal Court examined an RTBU challenge to this design and found the fleet's reliance on CCTV "has the potential to expose weaknesses" in how it operates (Sydney Trains v Australian Rail, Tram and Bus Industry Union, Federal Court of Australia, 2024). A union member survey reported 90% of respondents would refuse to crew the new trains on safety grounds (approx.; RTBU survey as reported, 2024) — advocacy rather than an audited figure, but serious enough to end up before a judge.
The government's own strongest case is about what it inherited rather than what it broke. A slab of the network's rolling stock is genuinely old: the Auditor-General's review of rail rolling stock procurement found the V-set intercity carriages Sydney Trains was still running dated to 1977–89 and the S-sets to 1973–80, both well past a sensible working life and lacking basic amenities such as air-conditioning (NSW Auditor-General, Rail rolling stock procurement, 21-Oct-2025). The New Intercity Fleet meant to replace them was ordered and mired in delay and dispute years before Minns took office, and the most dramatic network-wide shutdown of the recent run — a power and signalling failure on 21 February 2022 — happened more than a year before this government was elected. A government cannot fairly be blamed for the age of assets it did not build or a fleet contract it did not sign; its own $97 million repair blitz and the $2.1 billion Rail Reliability Plan that followed the Homebush review both suggest it recognised the scale of the inheritance, even if results have so far been mixed (NSW Government ministerial release, 2026–27 Budget).
The evidence
Whatever the causes, the outcome is measurable, and it has moved in one direction only. Sydney Trains' own performance reporting shows suburban punctuality — the share of peak services arriving within five minutes of schedule — fell to 83.5% in 2024–25, down more than five percentage points on the year before, against a long-standing 92% target the network has not hit since 2021–22, itself a low-patronage year distorted by the tail of the pandemic (TfNSW performance reports, FY2024–25). Intercity services, which share track with much of the oldest infrastructure, fared worse: just over 70% ran on time in 2024–25, a ten-point fall in a single year, against the same target.
The line-by-line breakdown makes the pattern sharper still. T8 Airport & South, which does not share track with the intercity or freight network, ran at close to 90% in 2024–25; T1 North Shore & Western and T9 Northern, which do share corridors with intercity and regional services, both sat around 79% — T9 nearly eight points below the year before (TfNSW performance reports, FY2024–25). Government estimates reported at the time put the cost of a single planned strike week in November 2024 at around $50 million to the NSW economy, and the protracted dispute overall at roughly $127 million a month while it ran (approx.; reported government estimates, 2024–25) — costs on top of the direct disruption to well over a million daily commuters.
The critique
None of the inheritance argument explains Homebush. By May 2025 this government had been in office for more than two years, had run its own $97 million repair blitz, had commissioned and received its own Sydney Trains Review, and was mid-negotiation on the enterprise agreement it said would help fund better maintenance. The Independent Rail Review that followed the incident did not find a freak, unforeseeable failure — it found a wire identified as a risk in 2020 that was never logged in Sydney Trains' defect management system, and a recovery so slow the review could find "no defensible reason" for how long it took to get 300 people off a stranded train (Independent Rail Review, 29-Aug-2025). That is a process and management failure on this government's watch, more than two years into a reform program whose stated point was closing exactly that kind of gap.
The handling of the pay dispute invites a related critique — not that the government was wrong to hold a line on cost, but that it took thirteen months, three waves of industrial action, a Fair Work Commission suspension and an eleventh-hour "line in the sand" ultimatum to land on a deal, 12% over three years, only modestly above its original 9.5% opening offer (government bargaining position, mid-2024, versus final deal, 30-May-2025; approx.). A government that removed the wages cap explicitly to enable faster, fairer bargaining spent over a year in a public standoff before settling close to where informed observers expected it would land from the outset — a long, costly route to an outcome repeated strike ballots and FWC hearings did not fundamentally reshape.
The wire that stranded three hundred passengers at Homebush had been flagged as a risk five years earlier — and simply never entered the system built to track it.
The Independent Rail Review's other finding is just as telling about how this government's rail operator treats people during a crisis: toilets were opened for the stranded Homebush passengers, but water was handed out only if asked for, no alternative transport was arranged, and phone charging for a three-hour wait in darkened carriages "does not appear to have been thought about" (Independent Rail Review, 29-Aug-2025). Reliability failures are, to a real extent, an inherited feature of an old network under growing patronage pressure. How the operator treats passengers stuck inside that failure is a choice, made in real time, by the people running the network today.
The risk to the future
A trust deficit the next fault, and the next dispute, will test
New South Wales' rail network carries more people, more often, than any other public transport system in the country, and the $2.1 billion Rail Reliability Plan and the Independent Rail Review's recommendations both amount to the government's own admission that its first-term reliability program had not fixed the underlying problem (NSW Government ministerial release, 2026–27 Budget; Independent Rail Review, 29-Aug-2025). The near-term risk is straightforward: another ageing component, flagged and unrepaired somewhere in a network with a maintenance backlog measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, fails the way the Homebush wire did, at a moment when commuter patience for repeat meltdowns is already worn thin.
The medium-term risk is structural. The 2025 enterprise agreement runs three years, meaning the next bargaining round lands in the later years of this decade, with a rail workforce that has just spent thirteen months learning that sustained, well-supported industrial action moves the government's position. Unless the reliability funding translates into a maintenance and staffing culture that both prevents the next Homebush and gives the workforce genuine confidence its safety concerns are being engineered out rather than negotiated around, New South Wales risks locking in a cycle: heavy spending to repair trust after a crisis, patronage and political attention moving on, deferred maintenance accumulating again, and the next bargaining round becoming the next flashpoint. For a state whose largest city depends on this network to function, that cycle — more than any single strike or single fault — is the risk that should concern voters most.