Robbie

New Victoria St tram tracks?

I wonder what the issue with the new trains is (apart from being built by CAF, who don't exactly have a reputation for quality).

Any idea when the new CAF units will be in service? This run would make sense because it's both the shortest XPT diagram and also the one with the longest proportion of the route under wire. Might as well use their dual-mode capabilities as much as possible.

I passed by Melton on a Vlocity the other week and the scale of works there is astounding. The new station is slightly south of the existing one so that the majority of the construction can be done without interrupting train services.

Apparently V/line was unintentionally testing slip coach operation on the Seymour line near Tallarook this morning. This could be useful if the Mansfield line ever reopened.

13km line from Liestal, BL, CH to Waldenburg. The lines leaves from a suburb of Basel, goes through some mean looking hills, ans ends in a tiny village pair of 3000 souls.

1980 rail car. It looks like a classic "boxy vintage LRT", except the rail gauge looks tiny.

Modern low floor city tram Stadler Tramlink except its running in the middle of fields. It looks quite long, about 80 meters.

State capacity is when you can look at a super narrow (750mm) 1880' suburb-to-rural single track rail line with 50 yo cars and can decide
"we should upgrade it to 1m gauge, increase frequency, triple platform length *and make it driverless*.
But keep it single tracked"
Then do construction in 1 year

There's a section of shared track in suburban Melbourne with diesel multiple unit trains passing every 2–5 minutes all day.

Victoria should electrify their regional lines, but won't. V/line operates what must be the most intensive diesel service in the world, with trains every 20 minutes off-peak (6–10 mins peak) to Geelong (70 km from Melbourne). Other lines operate every 40–60 minutes.

Only NSW and QLD have electric regional trains, but these are only a small percentage of the rail network. NSW has Sydney to Newcastle (north), Lithgow (Blue Mountains) and Kiama (south coast), QLD has Brisbane to Gold Coast and Rockhampton.

Byron Bay Train - Wikipedia

The image in that quoted tweet is AI slop. The real solar-powered train in Australia looks like this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_B...

It's a converted 1950s DMU with battery banks, shuttling back-and-forth on a 3 km line with a top speed of about 40 km/h.

Why wouldn't they open all or most doors if the platform is long enough? Here in Victoria there are a handful of stations with platforms too short for six-car Vlocity sets, and the conductor makes an announcement as to which cars and doors to use, but every door that can be opened safely will be.

I knew ARTC maintains their track to a poor standard but I never expected the Melbourne–Adelaide line to be this bad. The train bounces and sways and feels like it is galloping along. Every few hundred metres there's a BANG as the wheels jolt over a mud hole or something.

I love not being able to see out the window of my tram during dark and rainy weather. Why do we allow advertising to take up so much space?

Interchanging between modes is the second worst aspect of Australian public transport (after service frequencies). Perth is pretty much the only city that gets it right with bus stops integrated into the railway stations.

Japanese stations are a bit like that, aren't they?

Very little from this image remains today. All the buildings have been replaced, the motorail overpass is now the Bourke St footbridge, and G516 is on the standard gauge with SSR somewhere. Some of the Southern Aurora rollingstock has gone into preservation.

A lot of motorists feel the same way about bollards. Footage of SUVs and emotional support monster trucks losing arguments with bollards warms my heart.

I hope they installed points rated at 65 km/h or faster so the trains can accelerate quickly out of the station. Every little bit of slow operations hinders the timetable. New passing loops in NSW on ARTC-leased track have been using 80 km/h tangential turnouts for years now.

On Monday, there was denial and anger. On Tuesday, the union got involved so that was bargaining. Yesterday was depression and today there's acceptance, I guess. Hopefully I'll be able to find a new role soon.

Milwaukee Road "Little Joe" electric locomotive hauling the "Olympian Hiawatha" passenger train through the rolling foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Montana.

The Milwaukee Road operated the "Olympian Hiawatha" in competition with Great Northern's "Empire Builder". It was hauled by electric locomotives across the Rockies and Cascades.

So that's two connections between the cities.

This is ridiculous and I am glad Australia has the sense and decency to have independent Electoral Commissions for the Federal and State levels.

They should have started with the Toowoomba Range crossing because that involves the most difficult civil works and would have delivered the most benefits straight away.

By the end of this week is a bit ambitious, even by my standards. Could the existing signalling handle the increase in traffic? The Master Train Plan suggests that the line isn't particularly busy beyond Goulburn, with only a handful of trains per day.

It reminds me a little of the original TGV introduced in 1981. Those trainsets were stylish and the orange livery was the best one that SNCF ever came up with.

Soul of A Railway by Les Pivnic, Charlie Lewis, Bruno Martin and Andrew Deacon We are working together on this project to convey to future generations the essence of a once magnificent transport network in South Africa...

If you can find it, The Great Steam Trek by A.A. Jorgensen is an excellent photographic essay book from the late 1970s. There's a follow-up book in the works called Soul Of A Railway that's currently hosted online:

sites.google.com/site/soulora...

The GMA/M Garratts were underweight due to restrictions imposed by the Way & Works department, but by the time they were delivered the bridges had been strengthened and so the locomotives were semi-permanently coupled to water gins during their operational lives.

The Class 25 condensers sounded like jet aircraft. Interestingly enough, they were only built because Apartheid diverted money towards duplicated infrastructure so there was no money to complete the Hex tunnels and electrify the line through the Karoo.

The Class 26 Red Devil demonstrated what could be done with a fairly modest rebuild. It was a little too powerful because the 4-8-4 wheel arrangement didn't put quite enough weight on the drivers and it had a tendency to slip when starting heavy trains.

The Class 16E was a beautiful locomotive, and the rotary-cam valve gear produced an interesting exhaust rhythm. They were the largest and most powerful 4-6-2 Pacifics built for the narrow gauge.

Sunrise through the trees from the window of a train in motion.

Sunrise is almost as pretty as sunset.