All forms of transport, including gunzelly
My comment piece in The Age this morning: Metro Trains, it’s time you got your act together This is a result of last Thursday night’s complete train network shutdown — thankfully not during peak hour — when a control room alarm caused an evacuation. Oh crap. @metrotrains control room evacuation. (Showgrounds "good service" has no ... [More]
Some 2-3 months after they all re-opened, Ormond, McKinnon and Bentleigh stations are still being worked on. There’s been a flurry of activity this week ahead of the “Family Fun Day” tomorrow – featuring music, food stalls and a double-ended steam train with old “red rattler” Tait carriages to run between Caulfield and Moorabbin (stopping ... [More]
This coming Saturday the new Bentleigh, McKinnon and Ormond stations are hosting a “family fun day” featuring a steam train. Should be… well, fun. Edit: Here’s the steam train timetable: (Hopefully they’ve checked if steam trains are okay climbing the higher-than-usual 2.5% (ish) gradient heading north out of Ormond station! I’d assume so, given the ... [More]
The level crossing removals at Ginifer (Furlong Road) and St Albans (Main Road) are nearing completion, and yesterday the new stations opened. Originally the plan had been to remove the St Albans (Main Road) crossing — this was funded by the Coalition government in 2014, for a massive $200 million, recouped from savings during the ... [More]
This is old news, but it keeps coming up, and I never got around to blogging about it in detail, so… The popular narrative of East West Link (from those who wanted it built) is that the Andrews Government paid $1 billion for nothing. As you might expect, there’s a little more to it than ... [More]
Some local residents on the Dandenong line noted this summary of proposed shutdowns in the Environmental Management Strategy (page 11): Shutdowns â longer occupations, typically from 1 to 3 weeks in duration. Six shutdowns are scheduled between January 2017 and July 2018 and are likely to occur in: January 2017; July 2017; October 2017; January ... [More]
Real-time information became available on Metro trains on Thursday. Can we say hallelujah! Of course it’s been on stations for years, via Passenger Information Displays (known in the biz as PIDs) and the green buttons providing audio. But now departure data can be seen in the PTV app (and others) and PTV Next 5 web ... [More]
Vicroads are doing some good stuff. While some cynics might think of them as all about cars, over the years they’ve increased their emphasis on smarter use of limited road space resources, and have steadily improved facilities for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport. And I know from talking to contacts there that they’re thinking very ... [More]
Apologies for this very much locally focused (and possibly over-long) blog post: The main bus route through Bentleigh (both the suburb and the highly marginal state seat), the east-west 703 along Centre Road, is getting a slight upgrade. It doesn’t seem to have been announced yet, but eagle-eyed timetable watcher Craig Halsall spotted it: on ... [More]
Sometimes travelling by train at night you’ll see PSOs out on the platforms and station concourses. Sometimes they’re not in sight… they might be in their pod, or elsewhere. Given the high-profile rollout of PSOs onto every station a signature policy of the 2010-2014 Ballieu Coalition government, carried over by the Andrews Labor government, you’d ... [More]
I’ve been listening to a lot of transport-related podcasts recently. Almost all of them are from outside Australia. (Here is a list of some from November 2015; I mean to post another list at some stage soon.) Every time I listen to one of the overseas podcasts, I ponder what someone from Melbourne would say ... [More]
24-hour time is common in Europe, and in the airline industry, and the military. Internally, many industries use 24-hour time, but publicly 12-hour time is dominant in Australia. I have seen 24-hour time used at cafes. Perhaps they were run by Europeans; perhaps it was an attempt to seem more European. V/Line uses 24-hour time ... [More]