A trip to Seymour

 

J was on her way back from an art workshop in Tasmania.

Ordinarily she would have got the appalling SkyBus in from the airport to Melbourne and then got a train to Wangaratta where I would have picked her up.

Unfortunately there are only three trains a day and they need to be reserved in advance, and the timings are such that the only sensible choice would have been the 6pm train.

Her flight from Launceston got in about midday, which would have meant she would had about six hours to wait with her single large case full of art materials.

 So, while possible, the train was not an optimal solution.

I could, I suppose have driven there to pick her up, but the problem is Melbourne’s appalling traffic - on a good day it would probably take about three hours, but on a bad day it would be closer to four hours.

And then we had a lateral thought. Broadmeadows railway station is only a $15 Uber from the airport and roughly every hour there’s a diesel V/line commuter train to Seymour.

Seymour lies well to the north of Melbourne’s urban sprawl and is just off the main Sydney Melbourne freeway, meaning I could drive to Seymour station from home in just under two hours.

So that’s exactly what we did. We agreed that I would meet the 3pm train, which would give her plenty of time to get her bag back and get an Uber, and if the worst came to the worst I would wait until her train arrived.

As it was, Jetstar was thirty minutes late, but she managed to get to Broadmeadows with ten minutes to spare, and I met her at Seymour station at 3pm as agreed.

As a solution it worked, but it just showed how completely inadequate public transport is. There should be a train from Melbourne Airport and there should be more than three trains each way per day on the Albury line.

It’s telling that V/line offer  a mid morning bus service to Seymour to connect with a V/line commuter train in lieu of running an extra train service...