[Melb] Hillside Trains takeover: farce?

[paul@xenu.ee.mu.oz.au (Paul Dwerryhouse)]

I've been looking through the local rag and spotted an article on the
awarding of Hillside trains to MTE. Now while it didn't actually tell me
anything I hadn't already read in The Age (so, what _is_ the point of local
papers, anyway?), I decided to do a few mental calculations...

MTE claims it will upgrade four stations to "premium" status (ie, it will 
put the staff back at these stations for the whole day, and re-open the
toilets), refurbish and improve waiting rooms and add 130 services per week.

Now, let's see... 130 extra services per week. Let's be generous, and assume
that all 130 services will be added on working days... that means 26 extra
services a day. Now, divide this across five railway lines (Ringwood, 
Glen Waverley, Hurstbridge, Epping, Alamein) ... that brings us to an
average of 5 extra services a day per line.

Not much, is it? Probably doesn't even bring us back to the service levels that
we had pre-Kennett.

Did anyone in MTE or the Victorian Government consider that if they upgraded
the frequency of rail services considerably, they wouldn't have to spend extra
money on refurbishing the waiting rooms because PEOPLE WOULDN'T HAVE TO WAIT
THERE!!!  (Please excuse my shouting. I'm rather worked up about the way
marketing keeps pulling the wool over people's eyes).  Honestly, I couldn't 
give a rats' about the state of the the railway stations.  If the trains ran 
more often, we'd all have to spend a lot less time there...

I would like to see a frequency of 3 minutes between trains in peak times and
10 minutes during non-peak times. Cut the trains in half, if need be, but
do something about it. Smaller more-frequent trains are a much better 
proposition than long trains with millennia between services...

...Paul


--
Paul Dwerryhouse                                        paul@xenu.ee.mu.oz.au
"The growing use of e-mail, not to mention Web-page publishing, threatens to 
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the same time improving their spelling". -- Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal