Re: How about some facts about the NR class?

[telljb@ozemail.com.au (< Tell >)]

>mauried@commslab.gov.au (Maurie Daly) wrote and I quote 
>small bits:
>
>But no-one gave a stuff because Railways were then all about running trains 
>rather than running a professional transport business.

That still exists with some management and dare I say,
amongst gunzels. ;-)
 
>Its no secret that State railway administrations have historically always had  
>a policy of minimum or no cooperation at all with their counterparts on either 
>sides of the borders,and now that we have private operators as well , they are 
>also seem as the enemy.
 
Yes, and there is only one way to fix it, get NSW, Vic
and WA state governments out of the standard gauge
freight business.

>One approach that would be worth looking at , and is total heresy from the way 
>that trains have historically been run is to run trains as required , ie junk 
>the timetables.
>When a train has a full load , it simply leaves and heads for its destination.
>You get much better utilization out of your infrastructure .

That is *exactly* what the road transport industry
does, which is why it dominates the transport scene in
Australia along with many other reasons.

>.It also requires a bit of additional flexibility in your operation , ie 
>no loco or crew quarantining , which means that crews would have to know quite 
>a few more roads than they historically have had to , ie Melb crews to 
>Adelaide or Sydney, Sydney crews to Melb or Brisbane etc.
>We are slowly just starting to see this sort of thing with freightcorp and 
>vline freight starting to actually run trains between Capital cities and 
>not arbitrary places that happen to be borders.
>
>Also means a new breed of Train 
>Controllers are needed, a bit like the sort of people why work as air traffic 
>controllers.  ie the sort of question that a train crew out of Dynon might ask 
>of control at any time is "We are ready to go , when is the next free path to 
>Sydney available?"Given the incredibly low utilization rate of most of the 
>interstate lines in this country paths shouldnt be a problem .

Great stuff Maurie, but you and I know there is little
chance of it happening under the present regimes.
You will need massive change to remove the 19th century
British passenger train mentality that determined what
the "priorities" were for so long.

Cheers

----Terry Burton