Quotable Quotes

(or) MJJA sounds off!

Various snippets I've said on Railpage which I think deserve to be preserved.

Validating Tickets

Failing to validate is the best possible way you can say to the people who have the power to make it happen, "I hate trains/trams/buses, I want them to be abolished in favour of cars, or at least have services cut drastically. I also don't care about obeying the rules or being a good citizen. I put my convenience (not having to spend three seconds validating my ticket) above all other considerations."

The very best way you can get a service to improve is to use it - and validate your ticket on it.

It's because so many people don't validate that they have to conduct surveys to find out the same info - spending money on that instead of service improvements or whatever else.

Withholding validations in an attempt to get the service improved is like trying to increase egg production by strangling the chooks.

It's sure worth five seconds of your time to keep the service alive.

In short: Validate. It's in your interest.

The source of all problems on PT

A thought has just struck me. There is just one source of every single problem on the PT system. Late running, cancellations, vandalism, fare evasion, messy interiors, etc. What is it? Passengers.

Think about it. If all trains ran empty, there would be no problems with any of those. I guess that makes it a pity that only passengers can actually pay the bills...

How to be a good passenger

When your train comes to your station, get up and move toward the door before it stops. The sooner you are out, the sooner it can get going again, which means it will be able to stay on time.
Don't mess up the train with food crumbs, newspapers, etc; clean up after yourself.
Validate your ticket every time you can. The more validations, the more important the service looks to the decision makers, therefore the sooner it will be upgraded.

And so it can go on. Anything anyone complains about, tell them to do something about it, not just whinge to the operators.

In fact, Jesus spoke about suburban rail services two thousand years ago, when He said "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Amazing person, wasn't He?

Ode to Spark Drivers

My Lords, Ladies and Gennerplums.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I will now propose a toast to a group of unsung heroes in our community.

They get locked away in a tiny cab up front, never seeing their passengers except in a mirror or a security camera.

They do a really superb job - of the many thousands of trains which run every day, only a small percentage run late, some of those catch up, and practically none miss a station or stop at the wrong place. We never (well, hardly ever) see the wrong side doors released.

They stop at all the signals, protecting us from appearing on the front page of the dailies in small pieces.

Their job isn't all roses - they come across all the idiots who try to commit suicide, and get the trauma even though there was nothing they could do to prevent it.

They do all this, stop-start-stop-start, long hours, occupational hazards (eg drunk passengers), etc, all with scarcely a word of complaint.

So ladies and gentlemen, I raise my glass to the spark drivers of our cities. Long life and Xtrapolis cabs to you all.

A really good railway computer game

Here's an idea worthy of Brunel himself.

I've seen lots of railway building games, and driving simulators, and despatchers, in various stages of realism. But interest wanes.

So why not put them all together into one big networked railway simulator? One person can play CEO and say "let's build a railway here". A surveyor can find a route with instructions about maximum gradients etc. And so on. And then drivers can come and drive trains on the lines, and tell the timetabling people whether there's enough time or if they need a bigger loco.

Of course it would be hard to get all the people online for a network game, so AIs would do several jobs.

I thought of calling the game Higinbotham, because it's distinctive and gives the right sense to the game - building a railway at a great rate, not closing it down.

It's way beyond my programming capability, in fact it really should be done commercially I'd say.

Comments, anyone?

STOP PRESS: I have expanded somewhat on this idea: Higinbotham & Associates

Levelling the playing field

How can we level the playing field for long-distance freight in Australia? Here's some ideas to get the ball rolling.

Charge truckies the full economic rate for road access. According to ARA, a truck does as much damage as 20,000 cars. So charge a truck 20,000 times as much for a licence. That ought to get most of them off.
That should put some money in the coffers, so get all the weighbridges on freeways manned 24 hours. That should catch any trucks over the weight limit.
Rubber tyres create landfill, so when they're bought charge a $1000 bond, refundable when the tyres get ecologically recycled. Charge the railways that too - it's much easier to recycle a steel wheel than a rubber tyre.

Please go on, everyone!

What would you do if you were Transport Minister?

First thing is to get some money in. Now remember, the DoI controls roads as well as rail, so we'll start by making the roads pay for themselves. Truck licences go up about 1500%, cars 200% or so. Add a petrol tax too, with breaks for farmers who do a lot of off-road stuff.

Then, in the interests of car drivers who don't feel like becoming a "Mini-sandwich" we ban all B-Doubles except on a very few specified routes. (I don't know which ones, but leaving a few routes makes the truckies feel a bit better - yeah I know, I'm an old softie). Actually we could just tax them twice as much as ordinary trucks instead of banning them.

Now we have some money, and we start making sure it isn't wasted. So we make a rule that in each year, equal amounts have to be spent on all modes of transport, respecting the difference between capital and maintenance costs.

So if a piece of the highway is upgraded to freeway (capital, at a cost of say $100m), we have to spend $100m on (say) the cranes at Swanson Dock and another $100m on (say) extending Route 75 to Knox City. If airports are under the DoI too then they get an intermodal freight terminal or something.

That means that some rubber-tyred rat-fink in the DoI can't grab the whole budget for the year to complete his pet project, leaving nothing for anyone else. Maintenance costs go the same way - if there's not enough money, nobody gets the short straw. If sleeper replacement is "delayed", so is road resurfacing.

Tips for getting parent's permission for things

Be on your best behaviour for a week or so prior to the event. Do what they say, keep your room tidy, do your homework and get your teacher to say how well you've done, etc.
If that's not enough, mow the lawns or wash the car without being told to. Or ask first and do a deal along those lines.
Open negotiations - eg "Can go out just this once to go to the 4D Preservation Group meeting if I don't ask to go out again for two weeks?".

You'll need to adjust these depending on your own situation. But that's the general strategy if you want to pursue interests like this.

Alternatively, get them interested! Then they'll want to come and (oh dear!) you'll have to come too!

Making bus trips interesting

Here's a few tips for those of us who have to ride buses as well as trains, simply because the station is too far to walk to.

Actually get interested in them. They're not all that bad in their own way. They have fleet numbers, so you can treat them almost like trams (write down the ones you ride, cross them off the list, and see how long it takes to have had a ride on each one). Or listen to the engines and then see if you can tell them apart without looking.
Study driving techniques. It's really interesting watching how drivers open doors before coming to a full stop, accelerate sharply, etc to make up time when they're late. But don't let the drivers know you're doing this, they might take offense.
Change your position and see what is different. For instance, sit on the left one time and the right the next. Or go in front, between and behind the axles. Does the ride feel different? (Being in the middle seat on the very back row of the bus, going up and down the hills on Route 733 is a real roller coaster ride, especially when the driver's trying to make up time!) Then, if you aren't prone to getting sick doing it, try sitting facing sideways or backwards, depending on the seating arrangement.
Of course if you are a really bored person (only boring people get bored), just pick up a book beforehand. But that really is the last resort.

(Warning: this post contains mild BBCode. Rated <G>, or in the old system, ROFL!)

How to fix the NSW rail system

If we got European experts we'd have 200km/h trains every 10 minutes to Canberra and they'd wonder why there aren't enough people to use them... :roll:

If we got British experts we'd have CountryLink taken over by Virgin Blue and the Railcorp taken over by blind Freddie and they'd wonder why trains are stopping ON the platforms instead of BESIDE them. :cry:

If we got American experts we'd have the Murwillumbah (Sp?) line relaid with 60kg/m rail and a bunch of SD-90MACs hauling bulk freight trains at 130km/h, and they'd wonder why there was only enough traffic for two wagons on each train. :evil:

If we got Chinese experts we'd have massive 2-10-10-2 steam locos on the Hunter Valley coal lines and they'd wonder why the trains started out full and were empty by the time they got to the port. :lol:

If we got Russian experts we'd have the world's ugliest locos and they'd wonder why every gunzel in the state had emigrated. :puke:

If we got Queensland experts we'd have the state regauged to 3'6" on concrete sleepers in no time flat and they'd wonder why it didn't help. :?:

If we got Western Australian experts we'd have Costa's entire department in the unemployment queue, a massive bill for recruitment and training, an even more massive bill for track upgrades, and they'd wonder why all the problems suddenly disappeared. :bounce:

Please address all negative comments and flames to MJJA, c/- The Round Filing Cabinet, GPO Box On the Floor, In the corner of your capital city, Thrown Accurately.

AzN_dj wrote:
Would it really be $120M per year for conductors?

For conductors? I'm assuming we're talking about staff for all three modes of transport not just trams.

Trains:
There are 209 stations on the Connex network. If they are to be staffed first to last train that's three shifts per station so we need 627 people on duty every weekday. We can't make people work a full seven day week so we need another two shifts per day for weekends, that's 418 people. We also need a good number of extras to cover for people on annual leave, sickies, etc. A minimum of 1100 people for a guess. Each one would have a salary of $35,000 a year plus 9% super. That makes just short of $42m per year, and that's without allowing any extra for administrative staff to handle the extra work in the HR department. Also I've only allocated one person per station.

Trams:
There are 500 trams on the network of which probably about 400 are out each day (the rest would be under maintenance). Again three shifts would be needed per weekday so that's 1200 connies. Adding some for annual leave/sickies I'd say 1300 people would be needed. That makes just short of $50m. Again no allowance for admin staff and only one person per tram (when you have a 30m long vehicle with doors all along it would probably be better to have at least two connies).

Buses:
I can't find up to date figures but in 2000 there were 4600 buses running in Victoria. For a guess 3000 of those would be on Met routes on any given day. Hours are a lot shorter so I'd say an average of 1.5 shifts a day per bus running is a reasonable estimate. Even so that's over $170m!

So as a barest minimum, staffing the system would cost $250m per year. We haven't even started thinking about fare collection - I can guarantee we won't be printing tickets on Reflex copy paper and having the staff tear them to mark the fare type, so some sort of handheld punch will be needed. More money.