Public transport woes

 One of the downsides of living rurally can be the lack of sensible public transport, and here's a little story.

I've arranged to go to a digital archiving seminar in Albury on Wednesday afternoon, and at two and a half hours long the seminar is just a little too long to comfortably park in the three hours only underground carpark close to the city library.

I could, of course park in an all day car park further away and hope that there were some slots free in the middle of the day. 

This is of course a pain and I don't really want to spend twenty minutes driving round looking for an empty parking bay.

So, was public transport the solution?

Nope.

Option 1, the local bus to Albury, would get me there mid morning, but there's no bus back in the afternoon - well there is - but it leaves before the seminar finishes, so really, it's a non starter.

Option 2, the train, is a little more complicated.

The straight forward option is to drive to Chiltern and hop on the train and thirty minutes later you're in Albury. There's two problems here - the train goes at 10.10 and delivers me in Albury two hours before the seminar, and I'd have to wait to nearly 1730 to get a train back. Doable, but given I've got to drive to Chiltern, a 50km round trip, when Albury is only an 90km round trip, and probably not worth it.

There's a variant of option 2 whereby I drive to Wangaratta, an 80km round trip, get the 11am NSW interstate XPT to Albury, and get the V/line train back at 1730 arriving around 1815. In theory I could get a bus to Wangaratta but there's no evening bus back until 8pm.

The XPT isn't covered by the daily fare cap in Victoria, which means that with my senior citizens concession it would cost me an extra $8 over the five dollars or so for the V/line train back.

Now, as a closet train geek the idea of a trip on the XPT sounds like a fun thing to do, but being sensible it's rather silly - it's probably simpler to drive to Albury and spend the $8 on parking ...