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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

So its 5pm, I am finishing up work for the day and catching the train home. I am now in the habit of checking http://cityrail.info for any late running trains on my lines so I can adjust my travel accordingly. Today all services reported running “on time” @ 4:55pm. Cue 5pm when I arrive at the station(where I am writing this now) and all   trains are 5-7 minutes late. Cityrail doesn’t “officially” make a train late until its more than 5 mins late, this makes their statistics look better. In RCRs previous life we gathered our own statistics and provided Cityrail is not as ontime as the proclaim to be in their annual reports. Personally I think their statistics should be real, when all it takes to miss a connection is 2 mins & then you are stuck for 30 mins. What do you think?

Well, in the first day that RCR comes back online, it would seem that there were lengthy delays experienced by commuters on the North Shore line today. I use this line daily so was a little worried it would impact the evenings peak. Anyway, as luck would have it I had your usual 5:30pm crisis and didn’t make it out of the office ontime so I guess I must have missed it. From what I could gather from the Cityrail website, which had up to date info I might add trains were being delayed by around 10 minutes or so.

My train wound up being 4 minutes later, which I suppose isn’t the end of the world. Wouldn’t be good enough in Japan though…