Another in my series of ten year old photos, this time from April 2014.
The removal of the Springvale level crossing and construction of the new station was nearing completion, but alongside the new station, some of the old station was still to be demolished.
I went to the Williamstown railway museum for a nose around with one of my kids. This is the interior of a Harris train – the type of train I often used to travel to school on in the 80s.
Also in the museum on that day in 2014: these relics from 2012!
The old and new (draft) rail maps on display at Bentleigh station. The biggest problem with the old map is it didn’t show people which way the trains run, which is pretty important for a rail map.
The new map, with the lines having distinctive colours, was accompanied by a trial of a network status board, aka rainbow board. These subsequently rolled out across the network, but this sign announced its trial.
The 2014 state election was only 7 months away, and the government was going in hard on advertising its transport agenda.
Others were also gearing up for the election. Campaigners from Public Transport Not Traffic (a PTUA-allied campaign) handed out flyers at numerous stations, including Bentleigh.
Meanwhile if you wanted to catch a train, there was still a good chance it’d be so packed you’d have nowhere to sit, and nowhere to properly hang on.
Finally, a blast from the past way back to 16th April 1997: I found this faxed copy of a press release during a PTUA office clean-up. It was promoting the first official public transport web site, VicTrip.
Note it originally had tram and train timetables, but only a summary for buses. The current iteration is PTV’s web site, which has everything. You can find the old VicTrip site in the Internet Archive.
