Re: [NSW] - hilarious SMH article

[David Burns <dpburns@veal.optushome.com.au>]

Comments below

Hubert Lam wrote:

> I agree with you totally about the Main North line. i've travelled on
> it (almost) every single school day for 6 years now (and am about to
> finish the last trips!! HSC coming up!). However you must appreciate
> that the Northern line runs at capacity in the peaks, especially with
> the 15min Central Coast to Syd Terminal trains. It'll be hard to CR to
> put anything else on this line without having the Central Coast trains
> either making additional stops (makes Coasties angry) or additional
> overtakings of slow suburban trains (a real compromise on
> reliability!). That's why the all stops in the morning and afternoon
> only go to Epping, that's to minimise any problems with the overtaking
> business that only occurs on the Main North (and possibly nowhere else).
>

My immediate answer is that the Government should look for modifications
to increase capacity on some of the critical parts of the network. Again using the
northern line as an example (and everyone else jump in on the other lines)
extending the down relief (the freight line) from Rhodes to West Ryde
(note that the bridge over the Parra river already has pylons for a third line)
would reduce some (not all) of the pressure.

I appreciate that this will take years (eg. look at how long the Merrylands Y link
took to build). But as far as I can see projects such as this aren't even on the
horizon...

>
> I think the article meant "reduction in service" in places where it now
> seems unjustifyable--and the Northern line is NOT one of them. Every
> single off-peak train the runs towards the City is very well loaded, at
> times it even means people have to stand until Strathfield. The
> Northern line is sure to get extra services in the off peak, as the
> half hourly timetable has been around for ... hmm...much longer than i
> can even remember (it obviously was already there 6 yrs ago!).

I hope you're right - but what if they decide the upper northern only needs
one service per hour and terminate every second train at Epping?
There are quite a few places where CityRail may think about doing this.
And people will jump in their cars...

One of the key problems facing CityRail is that they are unable to track the
many individual train journeys made in order to understand both how people use
the system and even more importantly how this changes over time.
These problems result from the fact that the ticketing system does not provide sufficiently
accurate information about where people start *and* end their journeys.
So how does CityRail work out where services can be reduced?

dB