Berrima Road residents got an unscheduled Saturday morning wake-up call on 4 July, when several wagons from a Southern Shorthaul Railroad (SSR) train rolled away and toppled at a level crossing near the Boral cement works.
No one was hurt, but the road was closed in both directions while crews cleared the mess, and by Monday the Office of the National Rail Safety Regulator (ONRSR) had suspended SSR’s accreditation altogether.
ONRSR didn’t mince words, citing an immediate and serious risk to public safety under the Rail Safety National Law. The regulator noted the New Berrima incident is the latest in a series of safety incidents involving SSR and confirmed it’s continuing to work with the company on next steps, while other operators who share track with SSR have been given the heads up.
This isn’t a one-off. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is already investigating two earlier SSR runaways this year, both further up the line: at Clyde in March, where an uncoupled locomotive and five cement wagons collided with a Pacific National locomotive, and down the line: at Marulan South in May, where two locomotives rolled away with the crew outside the cab before someone jumped aboard mid-roll to bring them to a stand.
Boral, whose cement works the New Berrima line services, confirmed the train was carrying its cement and was run by “our rail services partner with their equipment.” Given that plant reportedly supplies around 60 per cent of the cement used across NSW, a shut-down freight line is more than a local inconvenience.
Three runaway incidents in four months raises an obvious question: was anyone at SSR asking why wagons kept rolling away before the regulator had to ask it for them?
For a town that’s watched cement trucks rumble past for a century, the wagons finally did the rolling themselves.
