Going underground
Andrew notes a certain fascination among some people with the London Underground.
For me, it’s the concept of an entire network of railway services where you don’t need a timetable. You just turn up and go. The result is people treating the trains as the default way of getting around for a lot more trips than you see here.
This raises an obvious question.
Why can’t Melbourne’s trains run like the London Underground?
Every so often people will ask why Melbourne’s trains can’t run like the London Underground, or the Paris Metro.
I travelled in London underground, France : Metro. in the 80s. There are many world class transport model. Are we anywhere near there being a develop country(as if). I can only say at the end of the day, we are still talking about it and nothing is done. — Commenter on The Age web site
Jon Faine put a similar point to Minister Kosky a few weeks ago, and it didn’t seem like she answered it very well.
I think what both the Commenter and Faine meant is why can’t you have every train line running (at least in peak hour) a train every few minutes?
The short answer is you could. With some caveats. But you’d need to make some changes to the way the trains work, so they were more like… well, the London Underground.
Recently there’s been speculation on some of this about my line, the Frankston line, with the Herald Sun and the local paper noting “secret” plans to take the line out of the loop. This is actually no secret; it’s seen on one of the Victorian Transport Plan diagrams.
So, let’s compare the Frankston line with the London Underground’s Victoria line. And I apologise for the amount of detail I’ll have to get into.
The executive summary? Train lines work at their most efficient (maximum number of trains running) when there are no junctions, no shared track, no variations in stopping patterns.
Shared track
The moment trains share tracks, they have to be very punctual (almost impossibly so) otherwise at peak hours, one little delay has a flow-on effect.
Melbourne: This is a big problem with the city loop. There are four loop tunnels, but fifteen lines, and most of them share those four. So for instance a delay on a Dandenong train means a Frankston train has to wait, delaying the following Dandenong train… you get the picture.
It also limits the number of trains that can be added into the schedule, since the shared track has a limited capacity (about 20 to 24 trains per hour).
This is why there seems to be a long-term plan to cut Frankston line trains, for instance, out of the loop. Reduce the shared track.
London: To compare, the Victoria line is two tracks from Walthamstow Central via central London to Brixton. No shared tracks at all.
Junctions
Get rid of them, or if you can’t get rid of them, add grade-separation where possible so trains conflict with each other less. If you can do neither of those, you certainly make sure junctions aren’t used anywhere near the busiest part of the network, eg the city centre.
Melbourne: What does this mean? Well, once you’ve got your tracks worked out, don’t bugger them up by having trains switch back and forth. So for instance for maximum throughput, you don’t want to switch half the Frankston trains to run through the loop and half not, and the same with the Dandenong trains, because that gets you back to square one — where one line interferes with each other and delays compound.
London: The Victoria line has no junctions except at the ends of the line, and into the depot.
Stopping patterns
Express trains save about a minute per stop skipped. So they go faster. This means they need more track capacity otherwise they’ll catch up with the trains in front.
If a train line has a mix of stopping patterns, you waste a lot of that track capacity. So to standardise is the best bet.
Melbourne: The Frankston line has the following mess of stopping patterns in the morning:
- All stations
- Express Malvern to South Yarra
- Express Cheltenham to Caulfield to South Yarra
- Express Caulfield to South Yarra
- Express Cheltenham to Bentleigh to Caulfield to South Yarra
- Express Mordialloc to Cheltenham to Moorabbin to Bentleigh to Caulfield to South Yarra
- Express Moorabbin to Caulfield to South Yarra
- Express Moorabbin to Caulfield, and Malvern to South Yarra
Obviously this has evolved with tweaks and fiddling over the years. And there’s a third track between Moorabbin and Caulfield which helps with some expresses. But it’s still hopelessly inefficient, as well as confusing to passengers.
London: The Victoria line has only one stopping pattern: all stations. As a result, trains run every two minutes in the peak hour, so they maximise the use of the track. It also means nobody ever gets caught on a train that’s not stopping at their station (well, unless it’s terminating early, or they’re on the wrong line!).
Remember though the Frankston line is about an hour long to the city. So some expresses for long distance passengers are clearly desirable.
Terminus
Melbourne: As with all of Melbourne’s train lines, trains terminate at Flinders Street, and drivers change there. Because this is smack in the middle of the city, and is the busiest single railway station on the network (in terms of numbers of passengers), this leads to delays.
London: The Victoria line (and the other Underground lines) runs through Central London, but has no terminus station there. The trains just go right through, with no driver change-over.
So in Melbourne, if you do that, obviously trains through the loop can just keep going back out to the burbs. For trains that don’t run the loop (as is flagged for the Frankston line), you could hook it up to another line on the other side of town, and run trains through that way.
So how would you run the Frankston line for maximum efficiency?
Off the top of my head, here’s one theoretical way of doing it in the morning peak (which may or may not be the best for passengers, and thus is not necessarily a PTUA position.)
Let’s assume that because the Dandenong line is busier, and for many people coming in from Pakenham and Cranbourne a longer trip, that it gets use of the Caulfield loop, and it runs express from Caulfield to South Yarra.
So Frankston trains would run direct from Richmond to Flinders Street. You’d want to improve interchange facilities to/from loop trains at Richmond (if possible re-arrange things so that cross-platform changes can be made, as on platforms 7+8), and encourage people on Dandenong loop trains to switch to direct trains if they were heading to Flinders Street, to even-out the train loads.
Frankston trains would standardise and stop all stations from Caulfield to South Yarra. But in peak times you could use the third track to run trains from Frankston express from Moorabbin to Caulfield and have others originating at Moorabbin, to spread the load and give the people from beyond zone 1 a quicker ride. So the only junction in use would be at Caulfield.
You wouldn’t terminate the trains at Flinders Street, but through-route them to one of the north/west lines. Obviously as Werribee/Williamstown is also direct into Flinders Street, that might be the one to hook up.
Now, our signalling can’t really cope with trains every two minutes, but three minutes should work right now, with future upgrades possible.
So (without me thinking properly through the implications at the western end) you’d have trains every 6 minutes at each station along the Frankston line, and every 3 or so minutes from Caulfield into the city and out to Newport (tweak it a bit to fit a few Geelong V/Line trains in there somewhere).
Important: Run them all day every day at least every 10 minutes so people never have to look at timetables (maybe drop the expresses at quiet times), call it the Bayside Metro, get the minister to cut the ribbon, and away you go.
At the cost to some passengers of having to change trains for the loop, and a bit less express running, waiting times would be slashed, there’d be consistency and simplicity, and reliability should increase, and with that patronage. And you’d provide a direct link from Caulfield to Footscray without having to build a multi-billion dollar tunnel. And it’s more trains than the line currently gets, so crowding should reduce.
Something similar could be done on every other line to maximise the number of trains running.
Then yes, Melbourne’s rail network would be more like the London Underground.
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SIEV
Call me slow. I didn’t realise until reading the paper on Monday that SIEV is an acronym. (As in SIEV-X.)
It’s authorities jargon, and stands for “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel” — the one involved in last week’s fatal fire being SIEV 36.
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On the 82
This is how it was told to me. Can’t say I’ve seen anything like this myself.
The tram was departing Footscray from the terminus, close to the market.
A passenger got on board, with two live chickens from the market.
“Mate”, said the tram driver, “you can’t bring live animals on the tram!”
“Oh. Okay”, replied the passenger. And, apparently eager to comply, he broke their necks.
The tram driver decided at that point that he’d just drive the tram.
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Overheard/spotted/annoying
Overheard: Young buck on train, reading travel catalogue to his mates, spotted a “bargain”, but maybe doesn’t pay attention to the news much. “I really want to go to Fiji.”
Spotted: Distinguished gentleman sitting at al fresco cafe table. Remarkably large foreheard, like one of those Tintin professors from The Shooting Star who needs the extra space in his head for his over-sized brain.
Annoying: Going to all the trouble of turning over the page in a broadsheet newspaper — quite difficult under some circumstances — only to find a double page of ads. Particularly when it’s ads such as bottle shops or cars, which I have zero interest in.
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Chuggers
It’s not enough that we have to deal with them in the city; now charity muggers have started showing up in my local shopping centre on Centre Road. I encountered them yesterday on my day off — two of them were promoting the Fred Hollows Foundation.
Now, I think that the FHF is as worthy as any charity. And most of the other charities promoted by the chuggers are too. ACF, Amnesty et al.
But I’m sorry, I won’t deal with them. I won’t have my time wasted like that when I’m heading somewhere.
(I tried to politely say this to one of them, but I fear it came out a bit ranty. I think he thought I was a crazy old man.)
Thing is, chuggers are like spam. They don’t stop you dead in your tracks, but they do slow you down. They’re not scalable — the more of them there are, the more irritating they become. And yet someone must be signing up, otherwise they wouldn’t persist.
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Pyromania
There’s a cold going round the family. I hope I’m on the tail end of it now, but it’s rotten. I feel fine 85% of the time, but every hour or so there’s a period of almost uncontrollable coughing, caused by an itchy throat that can’t be soothed by man nor beast nor Strepsil. (Not even the rocket-powered menthol and eucalyptus ones.)
That’s enough to have kept me at home for the last two working days, as I’d rather not inflict the office with my hacking cough.
Going and helping with a burn-off up on the farm on Sunday probably didn’t help. But it was certainly interesting to a city boy like me.
It wasn’t fuel reduction, but apparently to prepare for the next season’s sowing. After getting a permit to burn, and warning all the neighbours, we headed out with a tractor pulling a chain with a plough thing loaded with burning straw, and a smallish bulldozer with a water tank and pump, ready to put the fire out if it got out of control.
It didn’t — the fire breaks had been prepared well, and there was just the right amount of breeze to keep it going but not let it go too far.
So while we were on standby for fire-fighting, in practice it just meant standing about chatting (me taking photos), and every so often climbing on the back of the trailer with the water tank to be towed off after the fire-lighting tractor, trying not to get in the way of too much of the water splashing around out of the top of the tank as we bumped along.
The smoke got everywhere, of course. We tried to stay out of it, but it went right through our clothes, which all needed washing.
After a couple of hours, a fair bit of ground had been burnt off, ready for the next stage of preparation for planting, and we headed back to the house for some well-earned afternoon tea.
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Advertising transport
Is the culture around public transport changing?
Back in 2003 or so, General Motors Canada issued this advert: Creeps and Weirdos.
(Pic via Richard Layman)
Later they apologised for it.
Something closer to the mark (at least for Melbourne’s buses) would have been “Pensioners and school kids”. But that hardly bites in quite the right way to convince people to buy a car, does it? How about “Infrequent and slow” then? That’d be a more justified criticism.
Of course, if advertisers took potshots at cars in the same way, there’s no end of ammunition that could be used.
But more recently, public transport patronage (not just in Melbourne, but around the western world) has soared, and there seems to be at least some recognition that real people use it, at least from the companies not in opposition to it.
Real people who aren’t creeps or weirdos. Real people who don’t smell. Real people… who have money.
(Malvern station about a month ago)
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but she’s not even the “typical” CBD peak hour commuter. After all, it can’t be rush hour in the photo — the train pictured is clearly not crowded, and the lady has a seat.
PS. Followup post by Richard Layman, who had the Creeps and Weirdos picture, above.
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Itching theory
I have this wild theory that scratching itches is effectively masking the itch with pain. But because scratching can lead to damaging the skin, particularly if there is a scab in the vicinity, it might be better to slap it instead. That would overcome the itch without damaging the skin.
Just an idea. Not one I always put into practice myself. Does it make any sense?
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