Bendigo Bargain Hunt

Much of this blog post is about transport, but it’s mostly simply observational, not looking in-depth… I wonder if I should put these in a different category or something?

What happens when I combine my interests of retro video games and public transport? This: I spent a few hours on a train out to Bendigo and back to hunt down an Atari 2600 cartridge at Cash Converters.

I recently bought an Atari 2600+, which is a replica gaming console with mod cons such as HDMI out. It plays original cartridges (for the 2600 and 7800), which you can often find second-hand. There’s plenty on eBay, but Cash Converters stores also sometimes have them.

So on a day off, I went to Southern Cross and hopped on a train to Bendigo. The line runs mostly hourly outside peak.

It was a 3 car train, and busy, but not packed – unlike my last trip to Ballarat. But this was a weekday – the Bendigo line is known for bad crowding on weekends when 3 cars simply don’t cope with demand.

It’s rather nice to sit back and relax and watch the countryside fly by.

The off-peak services are timed to take 111 minutes for the 162 Km journey to Bendigo, an average speed (including stops) of 88 Km/hour. (Insert a metric Back To The Future joke here.)

On arrival in Bendigo, I walked down Mitchell Street towards Pall Mall. There seemed to be a lot of buses heading up to the station. I’m guessing they run a pulse-type service meeting the hourly trains. This is good – and helps explain why the station bus interchange was so busy with passengers.

Bike racks are common on Bendigo buses, though I didn’t see any actually in use. They arguably make more sense in regional towns than in metropolitan Melbourne. I know some people really like them, and I’m keeping an open mind, but I’m conscious of the fact that they don’t scale up well, and most of the world’s biggest, busiest city bus networks don’t usually have them.

Fairly quickly I found the Cash Converters and bought the cartridge – a home version of the arcade game Jungle Hunt, a game with themes which I suspect wouldn’t pass muster these days… but one I fondly remember from back in the day thanks to the fun gameplay. $10 – Bargain!

The bloke in the shop remarked that they hadn’t had a chance to test it, and extended the somewhat ungenerous short 24 hour warranty up to 30 days. (Spoiler: it worked perfectly.)

Near the shop I spotted what looked part of an old tram used as a part of a stop for the heritage tram. After pondering this, I looked for somewhere to have lunch.

Conscious of time until the hourly train, I ate a fairly mediocre sandwich in the Hargreaves Mall, as nearby a two person band played to a one person audience. It was pretty hot – not great outdoor shopping weather, even with free entertainment.

Then I walked a circuitous way back to the station – inevitably passing any number of nicer looking cafes with nicer looking food – and caught the train back.

The train back to Melbourne was one of the higher capacity short haul sets (designation “VR”), designed for commuter traffic, with more (less roomy) seats, only one toilet per 3 cars, and fewer bicycle storage spaces. They were introduced in 2018, with Bicycle Network in particular critical of the design.

If these trains were used in the intended way, you wouldn’t see them on the 2 hour Bendigo to Melbourne service; they’d be confined to short commuter runs such as Melton and Wyndham Vale.

But in reality they seem to show up randomly on any service on the network. One almost suspects V/Line treats all their VLocity trains as a one-size-fits-all, apart from Standard Gauge sets dedicated to the Albury line… and that’s only because they physically can’t fit on the other tracks.

On our trip, the lack of bike spaces did indeed cause issues, with the conductor having to guide cyclists to the correct door to load their bike, resulting in short delays at some stations.

But there was worse to come – a disruption on the line ahead at Albion (on the shared Metro and V/Line track) meant we came to a halt for about 45 minutes just outside Sunbury.

On a train that’s been stuck outside Sunbury for half an hour due to a track fault up ahead. The view is pleasant enough, but I wish I’d brought a book.

— Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen.au) 2025-01-08T05:30:38.000Z

Thankfully the train wasn’t full, so the one toilet coped with the longer than usual travel time. The conductor gave us plenty of updates.

A slower-than-usual run the rest of the way meant we arrived in Melbourne about an hour late.

For some reason the live updates on V/Line’s app flagged a delay with the earlier service, but not ours.

Thankfully I wasn’t trying to make a tight connection – my train the rest of the way home runs every 10 minutes.

(An hour or two later there were more severe disruptions on numerous V/Line lines, hitting evening peak and affecting a lot more people.)

So, any conclusions from this day out?

• V/Line on weekdays is less crowded than weekends
• …but reliability certainly isn’t perfect (and online information can be patchy)
• It didn’t cause big problems this time, but they really should try and keep the short distance VR sets on short distance services
• Connections are easy and stress-free when you’re connecting to a frequent service… not so much when you’re connecting to an infrequent one
• Timetable co-ordination between trains and buses is a good thing!
• I still enjoy playing Jungle Hunt.