Tens of thousands of commuters were stranded on train platforms around Sydney on the weekend with systems going into meltdown.

What should have been a busy Super Saturday of sport ended in a day of chaos on the rail network due to IT and other “technical issues”.

“It was a very unhappy day and I apologise profusely to everyone,” NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance tells Ben Fordham.

A metallic balloon is being blamed for causing overhead wires to short in the first major incident Friday night, forcing passengers to disembark in a tunnel.

This was followed by a software failure at Transport for NSW that lead to the rebooting of the entire IT network.

Delayed trains and cancelled services resulted in packed trains and extended travel times.

The problem didn’t end on the tracks with roads around many train stations becoming congested causing further traffic chaos.

“We’ve tried to lift the network from the dark ages into something which resembles a modern day railway, but occasionally when  IT glitches happen this is what we saw,” Mr Constance says.

“The key concern that I’ve have in relation to all of this, is that we’ve got to make sure the internal comms are good so that the station staff can get the message across to the customers.

“No one wants to see the image I saw of the station staff member being abused by a customer, that’s unfair.”

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Mr Constance went on to answer questions about Sydney’s delayed light rail project and what the forecast is from contractor Altrac.

“They’ve said March 2020… but I’m not going to accept that until I see a 2019 date.”