Rail Green Line

This blog is triggered by a complaint from one Cheltenham resident concerned about recent high levels of train noise, and her attempt to register this and obtain meaningful feedback about Railcorp's explanation.

The Railcorp Customer Relations Unit maintains a website with several topics and the correct phone number to use to for each topic.  To report noise or other pollution in the rail corridor, visitors are invited to call the Rail Green Line on 1300 656 999.

The person who contacted the Trust on this issue says the Green Line phone operator was extremely courteous but was unable to give any useful response other than "we are very sorrry".  (Not sure if he actually said that).  He promised that her complaint would be forwarded to the relevant authorities.  However he declined to give any information on who those authorities are or how the complainant could approach them directly.  If the complainant receives a meaningful response, this blog will publish that response in full. 

The Railcorp website also offers a Feedback Form that allows you to report a compliment, suggestion, comment or complaint against a number of categories.  The complainant was distressed that there is no specific category for what must, in Beecroft and Cheltenham, be the dominant source of complaints about the local train service, which is of course noise.  One would like to have a set of specific complaint categories - wheel squeal, locomotive noise, diesel fume polution, etc, but instead there is only "other".  A shame, because it would be useful information to have a breakdown of the statistics of feedback received.  Knowing that 75% or 5% of the complaints were about "other" would not be very helpful, whereas knowing that 50% were about wheel squeal would surely be informative to railcorp.