…and hello Metro
New uniforms for most staff, and new automated announcements (”Welcome to Metro”) are the only noticeable changes so far. My train was on time, but others were cancelled according to the upgraded Metro web site.
Channels 7, 9 and 10 were all down at Flinders St Station along with The Age Online to interview passengers, and apparently some media saw off the last Connex train to leave FSS last night.
They’ve already announced more platform staff, which may help reduce train dwell times at platforms. Whether bigger changes (such as running this “Metro” like a metro — frequent trains 7-days-a-week) are coming is yet to be determined.
I haven’t jumped on a tram yet to see what’s shaking there. The Yarra Trams web site has had only a few minor changes so far.
What are you seeing out and about?
Update 10:30am: Here’s what the launch circus looked like:
Update 8:30pm: Video from the Herald Sun, and also from The Age:
Tags: Metro, public transport, trains
13 comments
Farewell Connex
Connex took over running the Caulfield and Northern group lines on 18th April 2004, and to mark the occasion they put up a Welcome to Connex banner at Caulfield station. Evidently from day one, things didn’t go entirely to plan.
Over the past five years they’ve seen the strain of record numbers of passenger trips, with little government investment to help manage it, as well as reliability problems including the Siemens brakes crisis of 2007, the summer failures of 2009, and more than one trying day of disruptions from storms, as happened yesterday afternoon.
And so on Sunday night, we bid them farewell, and once the last Connex service (ironically a bus replacement on the Werribee line) has finished, say hello to Metro on Monday morning.
(And on the trams, it’ll be a switch from TransdevTSL to KeolisDownerEDI Rail, but keeping the Yarra Trams name.)
What will be different? Most staff will have new uniforms. Sounds like all the automated announcements will be quickly changed, and Connex logos may disappear under temporary stickers, before being properly replaced over the coming months.
But the timetables will be the same. The trains, stations, track and signals will all be the same, save one train fully decked-out in the new colours. They’ve got some reliability targets, and say they’ll staff some more stations, but other than that there’s not a lot of detail yet.
Over time I guess we’ll see more changes. Metro won’t be able to perform miracles with the fleet and infrastructure, as that’s the government’s responsibility, but there is scope to keep enhancing maintenance practices, disruption and incident handling, cleanliness, customer information, and various other operational stuff.
Hopefully they’re up to the task. Good luck Metro!
PS. The Sheena Easton Connex advert from 2004:
My video of a day on the trains, from the final months of Connex Melbourne’s operation:
Update: Something of a farewell present — Connex is paying compensation to monthly and longer ticketholders for October and November due to late-running.
Tags: Connex, Metro, public transport, trains
6 comments
Hey you! Daniel!
American Express have this advertising campaign going on. Every time I open a newspaper or pass an Amex billboard, I do a double-take.
Perhaps this isn’t happening to people who are not called Daniel.
Please note: This Daniel does not recommend or endorse American Express products. They’d have to pay me first.
A new tool for spying on the neighbours
Yesterday’s great website discovery: nearmap.com, which shows high resolution (and recent) satellite pictures of Melbourne and other places — a leapfrog over anything currently on Google Maps.
And I discovered that Ormond station has its official three-letter code, OMD, written on the top of it. How odd; I wonder why?
Alas, Frankston doesn’t, and I haven’t found any others so far.
Tags: nearmap.com, Ormond
11 comments
Moving house (literally)
I hate moving house. Glad it’s not me.
Tags: moving
4 comments
The most useless map ever
The Myki people finally posted some useful information on their web site, just days after the PTUA posted a Myki Q+A.
They’ve also posted this gem on the Myki web site: Under Maps / Metro trains, it purports to be a “Metro train zones” map.
What an utterly pointless creation. No reference point other than the bay. How does this help anybody at all?
(Stop press: I gave feedback to the TTA yesterday, and they appear to have already taken it offline.)
Mind you, it could be worse. Because it’s so uninformative, at least it’s not wrong.
Unlike this one, which appeared on stations in late-2003, and is riddled with errors:
Apart from the fact that it’s severely not-to-scale (Box Hill is not next to Belgrave, and neither are Clayton, Glen Waverley and Box Hill all adjacent; Ashburton is actually north of East Malvern), it manages to put some places in the wrong zones: Williamstown is actually well within Zone 1, whereas Laverton, Sunshine and others are on the zone overlap.
In both of these cases, you really have to wonder: What were they thinking?
Tags: maps, Myki, public transport
11 comments
Overhang
One of the things you really notice as a pedestrian in wet weather is low-hanging branches over the footpaths.
I don’t know if the wet weather we’ve been having causes the trees and bushes to put on a growth spurt, or it’s just more noticeable because every time you brush against something lots of water falls on you, or because it’s harder to avoid head collisions while dodging puddles and holding an umbrella, but it’s been particularly apparent the last couple of days.
Yesterday afternoon I went out with the clippers to ensure the tree outside my house that overhangs the path isn’t in anybody’s way.
Of course, I shouldn’t have done it straight after it had been raining, as it resulted in masses of water showering down on me every time I nudged a branch.
But oh well, anybody walking down my street (and we don’t get heaps of traffic, foot or otherwise) can rest assured, they won’t have to duck when passing my house.
It’s worth a few minutes’ work to make life easier for my fellow pedestrians.
I must check if there are council bylaws about this kind of thing. Checked your overhanging trees recently?
Tags: pedestrians, rain, trees
11 comments
No, I won’t
See here’s the thing, Mr Facebook.
Just because someone I know on your fine service has managed to resist the temptation to add 300 “friends” (most of whom in reality he barely knows) who can bombard him with requests to play Mafia Wars and Farmville and endless pointless quizzes, doesn’t mean you can rope me into suggesting people to him.
If he feels he has the time to throw away so that he keep his eyeballs staring at your web site for hours on end, so you can serve him irritating and irrelevant adverts, I’m sure he’ll find people to add himself.
If on the other hand he’s managed to limit his Facebook addiction, and “only has 18 friends on Facebook”, then good for him. I’m not going to mess that up.
Tags: Facebook
12 comments
