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]
Tag: trains
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]
Overheard near Nagambie, about travelling to Melbourne: “A lot of people go to Seymour to catch the train. There’s one once an hour from there.” Yep. At stations beyond Seymour, where the Shepparton and the Albury line branch off, there’s usually only about 3 trains each way per day. But at Seymour, there are 20 ... [More]
Many European countries put serious resources into their public transport systems and have networks that are the envy of the world, but don’t necessarily assume they are better than us in every single respect. For instance, one might assume that German trains are never late — or at least that their punctuality is light years ... [More]
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Pictures from Violet Town
It was 44 years last week since the 1969 crash of the Southern Aurora into a goods train at Violet Town in northeast Victoria. (Upgrades to safety systems should ensure such a crash doesn’t happen again.) The CFA has published a set of photos and a fascinating article about the disaster — well worth a ... [More]
If you improve a product, and want it to sell well, you need to make people aware of it. When they launched trains every 10 minutes between the City and Ringwood, Dandenong and Frankston last year on weekends, there was an initial bit of publicity via the media, but very little else. Metro did some ... [More]
PTV yesterday released the results of the October 2012 train load surveys. These are primarily to measure how crowded trains are, against the 798 benchmark (which is not a capacity figure). Overall most lines are improving or about the same, the exception being the Dandenong and Werribee lines, both of which are becoming more crowded. ... [More]
Metro missed its performance target in December, issuing an intriguingly vague statement which initially did not mention the compensation payable nor link to the form required. It’s since been modified to include those. Generally speaking if you have a Pass of 28 days or longer, and travel on trains more than 10 times in that ... [More]
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Hitachi trains: forty years on
Forty years ago this week (on Christmas Eve to be precise) the first Hitachi train went into service. Here’s an article and some blueprints published in the Victorian Railways internal newsletter in June 1970, showing off models of the then-proposed trains. (Click on the pictures to view them bigger in Flickr.) The “driving trailer” carriages ... [More]
For the second time in a week, I’ve watched as tonight’s 6:31pm route 703 bus pulls out just as the train (due at 6:30pm) departs Bentleigh station and a crowd of people off the train approaches the stop. Now, I accept that buses should run to time. And the operator contract probably penalises late-running (bearing ... [More]
This seems to cause endless confusion: A figure of 798 (or 133 per carriage) is often incorrectly implied to be the capacity of a Melbourne train. According to Victorian government standards, a six-carriage train is considered “full” if more than 798 passengers are aboard. — Age 17/5/2011: Peak-hour trains still a horror trip But 798 ... [More]
Southland station makes sense. The rail line runs adjacent to the west side of the centre. It’s the kind of destination midway along the line which can boost patronage (eg get people out of cars) without putting pressure on peak hour services. “But…” FAQs It’s too close to Highett/Cheltenham! — no, it’d be about 1.2km ... [More]