I’m still planning on a blog post about level crossing removals / elevated rail — after digesting all the information released today on the Dandenong line crossings. This is just a quickie to address a specific related topic: Value capture above railway lines, specifically when tracks are dropped below road level, the idea that you ... [More]
After the mess of the last attempt, and noting the large number of people reading on mobile devices (phones 39%, tablet 10%), I’ve switched to a plain but hopefully more mobile-friendly blog template. Here is a photo of some people doing geeky things to test the pictures. I’ll probably do some tweaking, but any feedback ... [More]
V/Line has been a real mess since January. On Thursday 14/1 it was announced a large number of V/Locity carriages were being pulled out of service due to an issue with wheels. The result was lots of cancelled or shorter trains, meaning delays and crowding, particularly in peak hour. Publicly at least, it’s still unclear ... [More]
You’ve probably heard all about this by now. From Facebook: Guys this is the true crime story of the decade: Yesterday a friend told me what might well be the best story I’ve ever heard. She had caught the train in from Frankston. And while she was waiting for the train to come, she noticed ... [More]
Covering the last few weeks, which started off pretty quiet, so let’s see how this goes as a monthly post. But I’ll post on V/Line issues and elevated rail separately. Night Network performance This seems to have been pretty good in the first few weeks. Overnight/early morning services on the 2nd and 3rd of January ... [More]
This week marks the first weekday shutdown of the Frankston line for level crossing removal works. It lasts until Sunday, but there will be a lot more later in the year. And obviously more on various lines as the many level crossing removals take place. Gradually it’ll affect most of Melbourne’s train lines, so I ... [More]
For the video editors in our family who need to move big files around, apart from internet upload speeds, I was also researching the fastest connection types for portable hard drives. Theoretical speeds: USB 2: 60 MB/s Firewire 800: 133 MB/s USB 3: 625 MB/s Thunderbolt 2: 1250 MB/s (USB 3.1 will apparently be up ... [More]
Not to pre-empt anything, but this year I expect to have two film and television students in the house. For this, I’m considering upgrading my Internet. We’re currently on iiNet Naked ADSL2+ costing $69.99 per month (for 1000 Gb of data, of which, to my surprise, we’re using about a quarter). Actually I’m paying an ... [More]
Continuing my series of posts of ten year old photos… New Year’s Eve 2005/06 was the second year of all-night trains, and I sampled them for myself. Flinders Street station at about 1am was pretty busy. Still some crowds outside, very much a party atmosphere as I recall. The platforms and trains were pretty packed, ... [More]
So, now we know which train is which… If you’re a regular on Melbourne’s trains, particularly in the southern and western lines, you’d have noticed the recent changes to seat layouts, but the process of reducing the number of seats on metropolitan trains actually started some time ago, during the huge patronage growth of last ... [More]
What can you buy for $1? You certainly can’t buy a newspaper. The Herald Sun costs $1.40 on weekdays; The Age costs $2.50; The Australian is $2.70. So I’m finding it difficult to be too outraged at standard stamps going up to $1. In fact this letter in Saturday’s Age perfectly sums up how I ... [More]
Here are a few blog stats from 2015… Posts: 166 — more than I thought, but I suppose there’s been a post every few days. Comments: 1,692 Top ten commenters: Daniel 176 (seems I still like commenting on my own posts) Roger 132 TranzitJim 69 Llib 52 David Stosser 48 Andrew 47 enno 45 John ... [More]
It is a common scam for people to ring you up claiming to be from Microsoft or Telstra (or another major corporation that sounds plausible). They tell you your computer and/or internet connection has a problem, and it needs to be fixed or your internet connection will be cut off, or that something else bad ... [More]
From Friday (January 1st) it seems a bug got into the Siemens train automatic announcements, probably associated with the timetable changes which took effect on that date. Since then, the trains (unless the driver turns off all of the auto announcements) will remind you to “Mind the gap between the train and the platform” with ... [More]
The PTV Night Network (formerly known as Homesafe) kind of sort of started on New Years Eve, with trains, all trams and the new Night Buses running for the first time. For the rest of the weekend, trains, six tram routes and the Night Buses will run, meaning by the end of Sunday, many routes ... [More]
Chadstone Shopping Centre, perpetually in a battle to maintain its status as Australia’s biggest shopping mall, opened a new bus interchange in August. I finally got around to seeing it just before Christmas. My first impressions… The good: All the buses serving Chadstone go to one spot, which is far less dispersed than the old ... [More]