RateCityRail

Dear All,

RCR will be changing web hosts this week and there may be some down time on the website. Never fear we arn’t going away that easily

We hope to resume normal service from Monday 23/3/09, so please stay with us.

On other news, I had to get a bus today, I swear Sydney buses are more horrible than trains. I had 3 full buses go straight past the stop leaving myself and quite a few other commuters stuck. Finally the bus I managed to get on was crowded worse han any Cityrail train I’ve been on. Maybe I should start a RateSydneyBuses.com?

Dear RCR Readers,

Welcome to 2009. I’m finally back from leave and back on the trains again this week. It’s certainly shaping up to be an interesting year on the trains. Fares to rise, Cityrail changing the timetable and Cityrail endorsing trains to travel at “crush” capacity more frequently to support the new timetables.

This “crush” situation I’ll discuss in another post, but it does pose some interesting questions.

My experience on the trains this week since I’ve been back has been mixed. All the trains have been ontime, but I’m really struggling with the heat & humidity of the trains and underground stations.

Town Hall this week has just been unbareable(for someone who wears business shirt, tie & pants & considers themselves reasonably fit). You hop off either a nice cold train, or boiling hot one and just melt straight away.

Trains with A/C, or working A/C have been a little hard to get, but we’ll just have to see what the rest of summer has to say about that.

Later this week I’ll do some coverage on the overcrowding Cityrail is volunteering all commuters for in peak.

Can’t wait!

RCR

Ah that was my piece of gold gleaned from yesterdays travelling experiences.

Travel during peak down the North Shore line yesterday afternoon Citybound was a little haphazard. All trains from around 5:30pm were 10-15 minutes late causing serious crowding on all stations I saw from North Sydney through to Central. At that time of the day with so many workers crowding into stations it just doesn’t work when the trains don’t show up.

Anyway as quite often happens at North Sydney, a train leaves that you’ve just missed. The station slowly starts to fill up with commuters. It’s been more than 5 mins between trains, people start looking restless and worried and looking down the line for that next train, it doesn’t come. Eventually the station fills up side to side and full length with commuters, when a train does come it’s not going to fit everyone.

Usually Cityrail keep you waiting the 5 minutes past 5 minutes late(so 10 minutes) before they start informing you the trains are out of time tabled order and initially no estimate on the next train. Finally the dreaded announcement, “The next City bound service departs from platform 3″, this means going up and over the platforms, which really was pretty tricky due to so many people on the platform and half the platform wanting to stay and the other half leave.

To Cityrails credit they were on the radios to the train crew to hold the train as it was due to leave, except half of Platform 1 was making the pilgramige over to Platform 3 and I’m sure the other commuters wouldn’t have been happy if it left whilst they were half way there.

Anyway, train was a cattle service as usual, my favourite point of the whole journey was the guard of the train after Town Halls crush “Welcome to happy hour, next stop Central”.

More of an informational, than a topical discussion here, but anyway, for the greater good. I heard and read today that from Monday 20th of October North Sydney will again have it’s ticket barriers in place(I suppose Railcorp need to start getting back some revenue)….

Honestly though, if you look at the typical commuter at North Sydney, it’s mostly students(who all have travel cards) and business people(who I’d like to think are 95% honest). The sheer flow of people that go through the station is massive, all through peak, I’d even say worse than Town Hall or Central due to the confined nature of the exits.

Anyway come Monday, be ready with your ticket and also be ready with your patience as I reckon it’s going to take alot longer to get out of the station.

I’ll tell you all more come Monday. Have a good weekend

Peak Hour

This being a retrospective post for yesterday(Friday 19th, 2008).

Well Cityrail really does have cattle herding down to a fine art. At 6pm on a Friday night travelling along the North Shore Line is what IT professionals can only describe as a “runt”. During a peak period Cityrail thought it best to send a 6 car train along instead of the regular 8 carriage train.

The result I’ve pictured above. Lets just say from the commuters perspective it wasn’t plesant to travel on this train, whilst an 8 car train would have still been crowded it just would have been nicer for everyone involved.

I will say this in the defense of Cityrail Station staff, who were doing a fine job of trying to advise passengers which doors were free at Wynyard and Town Hall so everyone could fit, although I noticed many that didn’t make it on.

This comment is for the minority of my fellow commuters, please move all the way inside carriages when a train is busy, I know we all have the panic “if I’m downstairs or upstairs will I make it off intime?”. Honest truth is yes, if you are leaving the train at any main station I can gurantee you at least 5-10 others on your level are too.

All in all a generally unpleasant crowded trip home.

Ah, did I mention the train was an old silver set that had a distinct lack of air conditioning? Ah but that’s a story for another day.

Happy weekend