Another in my series of photos from ten years ago. This month: July 2009. Then-metropolitan train operator Connex was advertising the addition of more station staff around the network. Frankston station. I think the construction was an upgrade to the bus interchange… which was all replaced again in 2018. Mordialloc station (I think) Richmond station, ... [More]
Year: 2019
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Walking around Carnegie
You always spot more stuff on foot than you would when driving. On Saturday morning I walked over to the new 627 bus route and caught it up to Murrumbeena, before walking home via Carnegie, my old neighbourhood. The bus wasn’t packed, but a few people were using it, including some boarding and alighting at ... [More]
The new trains are expected to go into service later this year, 100 years after Melbourne’s first electric trains started running. Their official name is the not-very-catchy High Capacity Metro Trains, or HCMTs for short. A friend’s son suggested what I think is a far better name, given the anniversary: Centennial Trains. What do you ... [More]
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Easy like Sunday morning
No time at the moment for any ambitious deep dive blog posts, so here’s a slightly rambling follow-up to last week’s Caulfield to City rail bustitution. For the entire week, I was lucky enough to avoid travelling in peak hours, but overall the feedback was that it was a lot smoother this time. There were ... [More]
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Transit Unplugged
I’ve been listening to the Transit Unplugged podcast for a while now on my (sometimes quite long) weekend walks. They typically interview CEOs and other senior managers from public transport systems in the USA, often small-to-medium sized operations. In recent weeks they’ve published a set of interviews with CEOs from much larger operations – and ... [More]
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Bustitution looms again
Just a quick one as I’ve been very busy, and have also had a bad cold, so haven’t felt like much writing. The next lot of major bustitution is upon us from Saturday morning, and including all of next week: no trains between the City and Caulfield. You’ll recall that at Easter, this was a ... [More]
Here (just a few hours late) is another in my series of ten year old photos: this time, it’s June 2009. Already the subject of a blog post, was this confusing ad on the side of a bus. Does it mean it’s flexible or not? Don’t you wish you were not packed into a train ... [More]
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Some Brisbane observations
Last week’s two whirlwind trips to Brisbane were busy with family business, but there was a chance for a few quick transporty observations. Tourists see signs for “stations” and might assume they’re all railway stations. Nope, some of them are busway stations – they just look similar from the outside! Boggo Road busway station has ... [More]
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Vale Uncle Frank
In the past week, I’ve flown to Brisbane and back twice. My Uncle Frank got very sick. My sister, my cousin and I are his closest relatives, and we all live interstate. Thankfully we were able to go and see him. He passed away on Sunday morning. It was peaceful in the end, but it ... [More]
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Train services vs patronage
A follow-up to last week’s post mapping out the number of train services per station. Commenter Andrew suggested I compare it against patronage – happily I’d been working on this anyway! Here it is – and as a bonus I’ve got hold of 2017-18 station patronage data. The darker the blue, the higher the boardings ... [More]
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before: slicing and dicing GTFS data is not as intimidating as I thought it might be, and it’s pretty easy to import into Google Maps so you can visualise it. Once you find what you want and figure out its quirks, you can get some pretty ... [More]
It’s the end of May, so it’s time for a batch of photos from ten years ago. I quite liked this ad for iiNet in Flinders Street Station: I was snapping photos for Tony’s web site “Our Fading Past” (currently offline, but the Google Map is up), highlighting old signs around Melbourne. This classic is ... [More]