Woman's death behind commuter chaos being treated as an accident
Police are treating a woman's death at a train pedestrian crossing - which sparked commuter chaos across Melbourne on Monday evening - as an accident.
Investigations continue into the woman's death at a pedestrian crossing on Holyrood Street, between Hampton and Brighton, at about 4pm Monday afternoon.
The tragedy forced the temporary closure of the Sandringham train line and thousands of commuters were made to queue hundreds of metres, including along the Princes Bridge, while waiting for replacement buses.
Planned disruptions to the train network to allow construction of the $11-billion Metro Tunnel Project are already causing commuter pain, with some people reporting additional commute times stretching into hours.
But there has also been a spate of unplanned delays that have compounded problems on the heaving network.
Broken escalators at the already chaotic Southern Cross station have been responsible for train diversions and massive elevator queues for days.
Commuters using platforms nine and 10 – thousands over the course of a day – have had to wait for a lift which only holds a small number of people.
One of the broken escalators is now back up and running.
Last week, animal activists shut down the city in morning peak hour to promote veganism and a film critical of factory farming.
Acting Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan admitted to 3AW radio on Tuesday morning it had been a bad week.
"Whilst we can't delay getting on and delivering big infrastructure projects ... we certainly acknowledge the past week has been a difficult one on the network, with both planned disruptions and unplanned incidents like the animal activist protests last week and accidents on the network," she said.