The downside of public transportation: Bus ride home ends in Brisbane

[depakid]

They only wanted to go as far as Gosford, but when seven passengers travelling from Sydney on a CityRail bus saw the outskirts of Newcastle they realised something was wrong.

The full extent of their predicament was revealed moments later when the driver told them they were on their way to Brisbane. And regulations prevented him from diverting from his route, he said. ''The driver told us, 'Sorry, mate, too late. You're going to have to go all the way to Brisbane,' " said Jerome Conway, one of the passengers. ''I just wanted to get home to Gosford."

The ordeal began on Sunday evening when the CityRail service to Newcastle, via the Central Coast, was held up at Hornsby station after an accident. After a two-hour delay, the passengers were herded off the train and on to coaches hired by RailCorp.

Mr Conway, a postgraduate student from California who is studying at Sydney University, said there were no signs or announcements to indicate the destination of the buses. ''There was just a security guard waving us toward the buses saying they would take us where we needed to go," he said.

With six other passengers, also bound for the Central Coast, he boarded a Pegasus coach. Unfortunately, it was a vehicle hired to transport passengers from an interstate CountryLink train, which had also been delayed at Hornsby. The unwitting travellers included an elderly couple and, as Mr Conway recalls, a teenage boy from an institutional home who was supposed to make it back in time for a curfew.

Mr Conway said the driver had told him that Pegasus's contract with RailCorp did not permit it to pick up or set down passengers between stops. While the bus would make two stops along the way, they were in small towns, and the passengers were better off enduring the 10-hour bus ride to Brisbane.

Mr Conway arrived in Brisbane on Monday morning and was told he would need to pay his own way back to Sydney on that afternoon's train. A spokesman for Pegasus told the Herald the use of buses as last-minute replacements for trains often created ''confusion about who goes where … because everyone is upset about having to get off the train".

He said the driver would have stopped on the way to Brisbane for meal and rest breaks but would not have been able to deviate from the route. A spokeswoman for the Minister for Transport, David Campbell, said: ''In this instance, while the majority of people were re-directed to their destinations on buses, there was a significant mix-up for a small number of people.''

More: http://www.smh.com.au/national/bus-ride-home-ends-in-brisbane-20090811-eh0o.html