By September 2003, I was using the digital camera a little more. Yum yum yum — doughnuts at the Queen Victoria Market One for the gunzels — trains in the yards outside Spencer Street Station (click here to see it bigger) Here’s one showing the old Spencer Street building… I think those who complain about ... [More]
Tag: trains
While the East-West tunnel has got a lot of attention, another questionable transport project is lurking in the background. Every so often someone will take a look at cities with ferries and conclude that Melbourne needs them too, despite the radically different geography to somewhere like, for instance, Sydney or Brisbane. And they forget that ... [More]
Another in my collection of photos from ten years ago… Murrumbeena, in the days of M>Train. I quite liked the logo and slogan (“Moving Melbourne”) — less sure about the colours, and of course the splitting of the network into different operators was silly. 2003 was probably the best fall of snow at Mount Donna ... [More]
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Down in the Metro station at midnight
For the first time in many years, I caught the last train home last night. So was it the dark, dingy, delayed and dangerous experience many assume it is? No. 12:06am — Waiting at Flinders Street Quite a few people were on the platform for the last train The train ride itself? Peacefully quiet. Along ... [More]
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Incident at Glenhuntly
Yesterday morning. The thump at Glenhuntly made me look up. Further up the train carriage, passengers were milling around. One of them had taken a fall — tripped in the doorway, it appeared. It was an old man a senior gentleman. Others helped him up and into a seat. The train doors had shut and ... [More]
I was pondering awareness of a couple of things, so decided to try a quick online survey. Over about 24 hours it got just over 100 responses… unfortunately unless I pay SurveyMonkey $19 per month, they’ll only tell me about the first 100. I think I’ll just go with those for now. (Some people didn’t ... [More]
The way the state budget has been framed in terms of transport was almost inevitable: the East-West motorway (stage 1) vs the Metro Rail Tunnel, with the motorway winning this round. While they are quite different projects, serving (mostly) different markets and (attempting to be) solving different problems, I thought it might be interesting to ... [More]
The Frankston line is to get upgrades worth $100 million — signalling changes to allow X’Trapolis trains to run, more shelter at stations, better CCTV, and better passenger information, including about connecting buses and trams. The Premier, Public Transport Minister, local (Coalition) MPs, heads of PTV and Metro and even the Mayor of Glen Eira ... [More]
A lot of the unfortunate jellybean characters are depicted around CBD railway stations at the moment as part of Metro’s Dumb Ways To Die campaign. I was amused at the placement of this one: …but this one is even better. (Only a short video — don’t bother with the sound; it adds nothing.) Perhaps I’m ... [More]
“We spoke to Infrastructure Australia and their advice was that the most pressing road priority in Melbourne was the east-west link,” Mr Abbott told reporters in Frankston on Thursday. “Now the Commonwealth government has a long history of funding roads. We have no history of funding urban rail and I think it’s important that we ... [More]
Mr Lezala also took a swipe at the State Government for failing to invest properly in signalling. “We have new signalling systems here … with no redundancy in them so when we get a thunderstorm it fails – brand new systems – because we didn’t have enough money to build redundancy in,” he told a ... [More]
I had been writing a blog post about proposed rail lines, and even went to the trouble of drawing a map of what was known about the various proposals floating around. Yesterday a very detailed PTV Network Development Plan for the rail network was released with lots of much prettier and more comprehensive maps. The ... [More]