Will it be a change for the better, heralding a glorious new era? Or will it be a complete and utter disaster, plunging us into deeper depths than Granville?
I don't think there will be many extremes - good or bad - arising from the latest restructure; I have not seen much serious suggestion that we are headed for disaster because of it and don't believe that myself. The government is saying that "the future of rail in NSW has never been so exciting" and I just don't see it at the moment.
Aside from the minister's propaganda and think tank plans for the future there is evidence that "Sydney Trains" is simply being plastered over "RailCorp", which was itself plastered over SRA, on official paperwork written by mostly the same people with a few different job titles but running much the same organisation, the same people being shuffled around SRA/RailCorp/TfNSW and now Sydney Trains, new faces mainly right at the top or in non operational roles who may, Howard Collins perhaps excepted, depend on the existing structures beneath them to get their job done, and a lot of undervalued knowledge and experience being lost through redundancies and retirement, never to return. It's still early days, so those factors might not mean anything, but maybe they do.
Given the number of people working on it, it's reasonable to expect modest improvements like better communication with customers - always welcome, but RailCorp was heading down that path anyway and we didn't need rebranding to achieve it. SRA/RIC/RailCorp already lost planning functions to TIDC/TCA/TfNSW supposedly to improve organizational focus etc. The puzzle has been rearranged but many of the pieces are the same; cash is still needed to make drastic changes, government decides where to send that money and whether to rob Peter to pay Paul in the process - whether Peter and Paul are now in different entities may not matter. We can't escape the fact that NSW is a large area to look after with high costs, low population, limited resources and dysfunctional government. The results are probably never going to be out of this world.
In any case, bitching about logos, uniforms, signs and bureaucratic disease as many have done is not the same as condemning the whole network to dismal failure, and I don't mean to do that. There are a lot of good people doing a good job and I truly wish the Sydney rail network all the best for the future.