Not a good sign
Arriving at the station yesterday morning, up the line at McKinnon, we could see this:
Not a good sign. Word was there was a fire on the train.
The evening TV news and today’s Herald Sun revealed what happened: Jesse Martin, once lauded as the youngest person to sail solo around the world, had come driving up McKinnon Road (speed limit: 50 km/h), somehow missed the bells, somehow missed the flashing lights, somehow missed the boom gate in front of him, somehow missed the six carriage train crossing the road, and smashed into it, causing a small fire.
I guess he can’t drive as well as he can sail. (Maybe he was trying to circumnavigate the boomgate?)
Thankfully he’s physically all right.
The line closed for at least half an hour. Knowing how these things can drag on, and the chaos that ensues, I didn’t hang about, I and a number of others fled for the 703 bus to Brighton to get to the Sandringham line instead, which was relatively smooth.
I don’t know if at any stage the loudspeaker announcements along the Frankston line included “Jesse Martin apologises for any inconvenience caused.”
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So why are the trains so bad?
I was going to post a photo showing the ugly truth of working at home with no aircon when it’s 43.2 degrees outside and nobody else is home. But I think the world can be spared that.
Instead I’ll ponder this: why are the trains so bad this summer?
Were they always this bad and nobody noticed before?
Firstly, note Connex’s explanation, with the main points being: tracks buckling (like happened yesterday), failing airconditioning on the Comeng fleet, power supply problems (which I would guess are made worse by the aircon taking more juice).
Taking that at face value, why is it so bad this summer?
I think there’s a combination of things here:
- This summer (and last summer) they’ve run a full timetable right through the holidays, which means there are less spare trains when some break down, and quite possibly less flexibility to do maintenance on the fleet.
- The timetable (since November 2008) now uses a higher proportion of the fleet than has previously been the case, meaning there are less spare trains if something goes wrong.
- Patronage growth in recent years means the effect of each cancellation is much more pronounced, and is subject to a lot more scrutiny.
- Obviously this week is a long hot spell, said to be the longest in 100 years, which has meant added pressure to fix problems.
- Tuesday 13th January was not only bad for heat and cancellations, but coincided with at least three line suspensions due to various other incidents — which probably helped get the media’s attention.
Not that any of this is excusable, of course. And it’s all fixable, and is the sort of thing that the government should have flagged they’d rectify in the Victorian Transport Plan, but didn’t. $38 billion may be spent, but we’ll still have these problems.
On the 13th there were at least 86 train cancellations. Yesterday, that record was beaten, with at least 115. Many of these were at peak hour, and to put it into perspective: a peak hour train carries about the same number of people as a single freeway lane does in half-an-hour. Cancelling just 8 trains is therefore the equivalent of fully closing the Westgate Bridge (in one direction) for an hour.
So the next time you see Premier Brumby on the TV, saying he understands your frustration at cancelled trains, and how they’ve got a Plan, you’ll know what a crock that is.
PS. 12:45pm. A problem at McKinnon made my trip into the city this morning a little more challenging than usual. The sight of a fire engine blocking the line at the next station is never good news. Reports are conflicting, but apparently a car driven by someone who doesn’t know how to deal with boom gates was involved. Further update to this here.
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I am not a Trekkie… am I?
I wouldn’t normally consider myself a Trekkie.
But when it was first on the telly, late at night on Channel 9, I did regularly tape Star Trek: The Next Generation, at least for a while.
And I did once dress up as Data for a Star Trek: How to Host a Mystery night.
But I don’t go to conventions. And I don’t speak Klingon.
When all ST:TNG started getting released on DVD, I was amazed at how Paramount thought they could charge $200 per season for them and get away with it, and wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.
Then the prices dropped a couple of years ago when they repackaged them all, replacing the solid, cool-but-awkward-to-handle way-too-big plastic boxes with cardboard. They went down to about $65, which perhaps is approaching the realm of reasonableness. I managed to pick up ST:TNG Season 1 in the plastic box version for the lower price. It sat on the shelf for a while, but recently I’ve been watching it with the kids, and we’ve all got a little bit hooked.
This, I think is a good thing. ST:TNG is pretty much all PG-rated, and in many ways it sets good examples. A crew full of humans of various races (and a Klingon). Using teamwork and intelligence to solve problems. A strong sense of morals. And like any good sci-fi does, it has some good special effects, and great stories.
So I decided we’d watch through the lot. It’ll be good to see those that I didn’t catch during the 90s TV run. We’re almost at the end of series 1 now.
The collection at the local video shop is a bit patchy, so I wondered if I could buy it all. Then I realised how much it’s all going to cost. Checked the DVD Plaza Pricecrawler. Yep, about $60 to $65 a pop. Another six seasons at $65 each about $400. It’s good, but Ouch. I had a look on ebay, but they’re a bit scarce over there.
On Friday someone at work was talking about how the UK Pound has dropped against the Aussie dollar. So I decided to look on Amazon UK. To my surprise, they were on special, marked down from UKP 34.99 to UKP 12.98. When you remove the VAT and add the postage, it’s less than $30 per box, so less than half the Australian price.
I don’t know how long the special price lasts, so I went a bit mad and bought all of the ones I don’t already have that were in stock. So on their way from Amazon UK are series 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7. I’m sure I’ll pick up 6 at some stage, but there’s no rush.
Oh well, there goes my DVD budget for most of the rest of the year. I only have myself to blame if I have no money.
PS. I’ve also watched ST: First Contact finally, and came to realise I’ve seen it before, many moons ago. Great stuff.
PPS. Hmm. Well. Okay. Maybe I am a Trekkie.
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Uh oh
- Tuesday: Sunny day. Max 38
- Wednesday: Sunny. Min 25 Max 41
- Thursday: Sunny. Min 26 Max 40
- Friday: Sunny. Min 24 Max 40
- Saturday: Sunny. Min 24 Max 40
Thankfully it looks like a cool change will come through on Sunday, but it’s times like these I wish I could hibernate in a cave somewhere.
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The statue
Happy Australia Day.
One of the most damn impressive things I’ve seen recently is the giant statue of Mazu beside the railway line between South Kensington and Footscray. It towers over everything else nearby.
It’s part of a Buddhist temple being built on the site.
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The passenger charter nobody knows about
A comment from Anna the other day: A letter in The Age today outlined what happened to an inconvenienced train traveller in Britain recently: after an hour delay, each passenger was personally given a form to claim reimbursement for the trip. The train management apparently have an agreed passenger treatment charter, and they abide by it. The question is – when does Victoria get something like this?
While that would have been a long distance train, rather than a suburban service, it may surprise you to hear that we already have something like it. Well, a little bit like it.
What you probably already know about
Most people know about the compensation scheme for passengers with periodical tickets. If in a calendar month less than 98% of services run, or less than 92% arrive on time (which is actually defined as less than six minutes late), monthly and longer ticketholders can claim a free Daily ticket as compensation. If the figures go less than 95% and 88%, then it’s two Daily tickets. This is a condition of their franchise contract.
True, it’s not much compensation after a month of delays, but it’s better than nothing, and those who claim may gain some satisfaction in knowing that it costs Connex to hand out the tickets, as well as administering the scheme. Obviously, this would be a good month to hold onto your ticket.
Much the same applies to Yarra Trams services, but with different thresholds (95% running, 80% on time).
(It’s worth noting that the fines paid to the government are separate from these thresholds, and kick in as soon as a train starts running late, not after six minutes. However Connex can ask for these fines to be reduced if problems are outside their control.)
What you probably don’t know about
But few people know about the additional “Service commitment” that Connex included as part of its customer charter. It has a number of points, including:
- If a line is interrupted for more than two hours and no replacement (bus) services are offered, periodical holders can claim free Dailies.
- Two hour ticketholders can keep travelling beyond the ticket expiry date if services are delayed more than 30 minutes (but being able to complete a trip is a condition of their ticket anyway, so I’m unsure how useful this is).
- And perhaps most interestingly, if a particular train is cancelled more three times in a week, weekly and longer ticketholders who validated within 30 minutes on each of the days it didn’t run can also claim a free daily ticket.
The catch with all this is of course that hardly anybody knows about it. And the company doesn’t go out of its way to publicise it. I need to check this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a requirement of the franchise contract, but Connex threw it into their charter, presumably for some good PR when the contracts were setup.
The scope for claims is also pretty narrow, and it’s unknown if anybody has ever claimed on these points, particularly the last one.
Even the well-known compensation payouts probably don’t reach as many people as they should. People throw away their tickets, and may not bother to claim. Of course it’s not true that only monthly and longer ticketholders may have faced continued problems over the month; weekly and 10×2 hour and even daily ticketholders may have endured enough to warrant compensation.
And the killer is if your line is crap for the whole month but the rest of the system is okay, the percentages may still be high enough to rule out compensation. (The old M>Train franchise contract calculated it on a per-line basis.)
Overall, none of this seems as good as the what the UK train companies offer, let alone London Underground, which compensates for any delay over fifteen minutes.
So how could it be improved? Line-by-line compensation would be a good start. Broaden the scheme to include Weeklies and 10×2 hour tickets used during the affected period. Perhaps do what some of the UK operators do and provide a partial or full refund for individual delays. Or provide discounted periodical tickets (with the affected operator paying for the discount) the following month, so any regular user can get the benefit, without having to fill in forms.
Even more importantly, analyse the root causes of delays and ensure that the operators’ fines to the government are re-invested in fixing them. Note that over in Perth, they are investing in more concrete sleepering of track to prevent heat-related delays, but there appears to be no ongoing programme of doing so here.
- Reminder: Discounted Yearly tickets via PTUA.
Now, if only the car companies offered compensation every time a car trip resulted in clogged smoggy roads and traffic jams rather than the emission-less free-flowing high-speed impossible nirvana promoted in their advertisements.
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How fit are wii?
I’m still really enjoying the Wii. The favourite game with the kids is tennis, playing on one side together, though we’re getting good at it and it’s been giving us some pretty tough opponents.
(I can only imagine that tennis purists are aghast at Wii Sports tennis; from the “best of 1/3/5 games” to the explicit explaining of what Deuce is to the always reading out the player’s team score first. Ditto the golf. Do golfers really say “Nice in!” to each other?!)
Baseball I’m not too bad at. I’ve finally figured out how to have a reasonable chance at hitting a home run. Bowling is improving. Golf is still my handicap; I can’t quite figure out how to put just enough power into my shots. I’ve only tried the boxing once, but will again.
The training gives you a mix of all this. But my real addiction is the fitness test.
I’ve been doing it almost every day since we got the Wii. Sometimes I’m absolutely appalling, and get a fitness age in the 50s and consequently feel like an old man. Last night I was 32. But to my surprise, most days it’s somewhere in the high 20s.
Who knows how accurate it is, but it’s nice to think that at least a machine thinks I’m in my twenties.
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I for one welcome our new Obama overlord
I know Barack Obama ultimately may not quite live up to expectations, but I have high hopes, and I’m certainly not sorry to see the back of George W Bush…
I had to laugh when I saw a photo of the Ikea Oval Office they set up at Union Station in Washington DC, complete with Secret Service agents on guard and an Ikea flag. What a brilliant piece of marketing.
(Photo by ekai)
They’ve also set up a web site to go with it, where you can design your own Oval Office with Ikea furniture: EmbraceChange09.com
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