Re: Cause of Long Swanston St Service Outage 21/10??

[billbolton.REMOVE-To-EMAIL@computer.org (Bill Bolton)]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998 16:30:49 +1200, David McLoughlin
<davemcl@REMOVEiprolinmk.co.nz> wrote:

>That's really slack. On my last visit, I noted that announcements were 
>made in the trams telling passengers of impending delays, or when a delay 
>or blockage would be cleared.

This seemed to be the practice about a year ago when I previously in
Melbourne.

In this case since I could not catch a South Melbourne tram, I went
out to Brunswick St and was on a tram for about an hour all up before
getting back to Swanston Street around 1pm.... to find service still
disrupted.  During this time there were at least two centrally
broadcast announcements about validating tickets, but no mention at
all about the Swanston St disruption.  When I got back to Swanston St
I could see a tram shunting a Flinders St, so I walked down from
Collins St and after about 5 minutes was able to get on a short worked
South Melbourne tram.  By this time convoys of trams were being run
bang road down Swanston St to Flinders St and through the crossover to
clear them back out down St Kilda Rd.  The routine was send down two
or three trams bang road from up Swanston St and through the
crossover, then run forward a couple of cars from St Kilda Rd and
shunt them back, then run down another two or three bang road from
Swanston St etc.

After that, I was on the South Melbourne tram for about 20 minutes,
and still no announcement on the delays. By the time I got back to
Swanston St, about 2pm, traffic was flowing normally again, though the
timetables were shot to pieces.

Cheers,

Bill

Bill Bolton
Sydney, Australia