RateCityRail

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”.