Pierre Bonnard and a train ride

 

It was Judi’s birthday this week and as a treat she wanted to go to the Pierre Bonnard exhibition at the NGV.

Normally to do this we would have driven to the city, stayed in a hotel, gone to the exhibition, had dinner out and driven back the next day.

Now, when Judi had had her shoulder operated on the Christmas before last we had discovered that there were a couple of serviced apartments you could rent short term in an apartment block opposite Hampton station from the company that managed the block.

Designed for business people who needed a short term base, it had free parking, good internet and was close to some pretty decent restaurants. 

In fact, it was such a good location, we’ve used the apartments a few times since as a place to stay when visiting Melbourne, as we would leave the car in the apartment car park and use a Metro train to get up to the city.

Since then the state government has capped the maximum fare payable on country trains at $10 – or in our case, as we have seniors’ cards these days, half that at $5 – meaning that it would cost us $20 for a return journey for the two of us as opposed to over a hundred last time we took a train back during the pandemic.

In fact at $20 it was less than the cost of road tolls, let alone the cost of petrol.

The only problem is that Beechworth hasn’t seen a train service since 1975, but on weekdays V/line provide a coach service to Wangaratta station as a replacement for the now vanished train service, and the coach trip forms part of your journey, you don’t pay for the bus and the train separately.

So, we decided to try using V/line.

The bus was a standard long distance V/line bus, as always slightly cramped, but clean and well maintained, with comfortable seats – absolutely fine for the 45 minute ride to the train station.

The train was one of the new long distance standard gauge V/locity trains. Originally they had had first and second class seating, but when they cut the ticket prices they discontinued first class. However, if you prebook seating online you get a seat in the old and slightly more roomy first class coaches at the front of the train.

The train was busy, and we were clearly having a Ryanair moment – when Ryanair started flying in Europe, suddenly lots of people who rarely flew started flying, and were not quite sure about how things worked, what you did with your bags, etc, etc.

Same with V/line – some people clearly didn’t quite get that if you had a prebooked seat you were meant to sit in it, not someone else’s, and that if your bag didn’t fit in the overhead rack, it had to go in a luggage area at the end of the train car.

However, it all worked out and everyone got there in the end.

The train was noticeably smoother and faster than the old locomotive hauled service at got us to Southern Cross more or less on time.

Then a hop up and across to the Metro train part of the station and then off on a Metro train to Hampton – not quite true, Sandringham line trains go from Flinders street, meaning a short ride between the two stations to change trains, but with escalators on the platforms changing trains was not a drama.

Dinner at a Thai restaurant that night and then a trip to see the Bonnard exhibition – many of the works on show feature in the Wikipedia article on him – followed by some shopping and city things.

One thing which isn't mentioned in the Wikipedia article was Bonnard's use of photography to capture street scenes and scenes of family life, and then using these images as the basis for his artworks. Given my interest in early photography and the impact that the 1885 Box Brownie and similar cameras on people's lives I found this particularly interesting. 

For example Kodak cameras are mentioned in Dracula along with typewriters as a way of signalling the modernity of the investigators. Much as phone cameras have done, these quite basic early cameras changed the way people saw the world by bringing relatively cheap and easy photography within reach of the middle classes. 

And then we went shopping - not seriously but I did make one mistake while we were out in the city - I wanted a coffee and inadvertantly chose a café next to an art supplies store - possibly was possibly not my best choice, as of course the resident artist took it as an opportunity to browse the paints brushes and papers.

Dinner that night was at Il Forno – a really nice traditional friendly Italian restaurant in Hampton, and the train back the next morning, followed by a bus back to Beechworth.

Certainly, we would do it again, and certainly much less tiring and cheaper than driving. As always the problem is that V/line don’t have enough trains to allow a faster and more frequent service, and  of course you can only do this during the week – the weekend coach services are so attenuated that you can’t manage a trip without either a long wait – nearly three hours - at Wangaratta, or paying extra to travel on the NSW trains XPT, which kind of negates the advantage of the cheap fares in Victoria - $47 rather than $10 for a standard ticket, and remember that you would have to pay for the bus as a separate ride, making it more like $60 a head, meaning that if there are two of you, you might as well drive.

Nevertheless the capped $10 fare is a good thing, making what was previously unaffordable affordable.

 

 

A train ride

 

About three weeks ago, when we were on our way to Melbourne for a medical appointment for J, we broke down with an automatic transmission fault.

That's resolved now, but J had had to reschedule her appointment, and the hospital was very helpful and squeezed us into the consultant's schedule.

Due to other commitments, we didn't have the time for an overnight stay in the city, and we certainly didn't want to drive there and back in a day - it's near enough 300km each way, and these days (getting old) I find long drives after dark a  tad stressful.

So we decided to go by train. Not only is it ludicrously cheap at just over $10 for two seniors tickets due to the daily fare cap, the fairly skeletal service of three trains each way does mean you can get down and back in a day.

There's a connecting bus service from Beechworth that leaves at 0630 to connect with the 0740 train at Wangaratta, and also a bus back, but the schedule means that even though the train gets in at around 2045, we wouldn't be home until nearly 2200.

So we drove down to Wangaratta.

Up at 0515 - tea and toast, and leaving our lightly bemused felines with double serves of cat nuts and extra water, and off as the sun came up driving down through late autumn mist. 

While the car's thermometer said 4C when we left it was down to -1C by the time we dropped down into the Ovens valley, and not much higher by the time we got to the train station.

Half the carpark was closed off due to works connected with the track realignment for the new high capacity inland freight line, but I managed to find a spot, so in we trekked to the station.

The train arrived on time, and while busy, was not overcrowded. We'd had the foresight to bring some water and a couple of muesli bars with us, for as usual V/line was under the delusion it was offering a buffet service.

It wasn't. 

As usual the coffee machine was out of order, and this time they claimed to have an operating buffet. That's not as great as it sounds as the buffet was in the front three cars - the train consisted of two three car sets coupled together - and we were in the rear three car set.

Unlike some other railway operators, for example on some Scotrail trains, V/line's Vlocity trains don't have a way of providing a link between the sets when they couple trains together, which meant that the buffet might as well have been in Darwin for all the use it was.

Grumbles aside, and despite the obligatory inexplicable stop in some post industrial wasteland outside of Craigieburn, the train did arrive on time.

The hospital is in Malvern on the Frankston line so we hopped on a Metro train that claimed to be running through to Frankston. This was a complete lie, despite all the signage in Southern Cross claiming it was going to Frankston, and all the onboard signage agreeing about its ultimate destination, it terminated at Flinders Street.

Complete pain in the bottom, but fortunately there was a train on the next platform that was not only going to Frankston, but after South Yarra was running express to Malvern.

We'd had a tentative plan for a coffee and a muffin at a cafe we liked in Malvern, but we were running late and decided to walk directly to the hospital.

We might have missed the cafe, but I think it had gone.

As it was, it turned out for the best as J's consultant asked "have you eaten?", and when she said not since around eight this morning, he replied "Good, I need you to have these extra tests today if possible".

So, after a visit to the hospital's pathology lab we ended up having lunch in the hospital cafe at around half past two in the afternoon.

Our train back to Wangaratta didn't leave till six that evening, which gave us an hour or three to kill.

Completely out of ideas, we hopped on a tram down Wattletree road to the National Gallery, which not only has a more than reasonable collection, has quite a nice cafe, which late in the afternoon wasn't busy, so we had a cup of tea and looked at the art.

After the gallery closed, we got the tram to the station.

We knew V/line would be incapable of providing any catering worth a damn on the train, so our idea was to pick up some designer take out sandwiches. 

Before the pandemic Southern Cross sported a range of interesting take out sandwich shops, but these have mostly been replaced by variants on the fatburger and fries theme.

However, there's also a Woolworths Metro in the station, and we picked up some fruit, some fairly boring but fresh enough ham and cheese sandwiches, and by mistake a bag of some quite peculiar chips made out of a mix of taro and sweet potato that tasted like salty crisp foam rubber - basically a vegetarian equivalent to a Pringle.

Even though we had half an hour to spare, our train was waiting and the green door lights were lit, so despite the people sitting and waiting on the platform, I tried one of the doors, and it opened, so we hopped on, to be followed by everyone else who hadn't realised the train was ready for boarding.

We left on time and rattled through the dark dark night - country rail stations and country towns in Victoria have pretty poor street lighting on the whole - and arrived more or less on time.

When we got home we were greeted by a pair of yowling cats wondering where we had got to, and the discovery we were out of whisky, so we ended up finishing the Christmas cooking brandy in a pair of lukewarm brandy lime and sodas - we were out of ice as well.

However, it gave us that 'Aah' moment when you sit down after a long day.

Despite my being rude about V/line's service they did get us there and bring us home on time, and all in all we had a pretty successful, if long day ...

We went to Melbourne ...

 

... on a train!

We had more or less given up on the train - slow, often late, and sometimes replaced by a bus at short notice.

Which was a pity, because when we had used it in the past, it was not unpleasant - slow, tedious, but pleasant enough, just not good enough to be relied on if you have a meeting or an appointment at the other end.

Now, if you've been following the dogfood tablet saga, you'll know that J managed to injure herself doing yoga, and we've been spending a lot of time in doctor's waiting rooms and local medical services companies.

The upshot of our various scans and visits is that while the cause of the problem is apparent - a small labral tear - the solution wasn't.

So the suggestion was that we go and see an orthopaedic surgeon who specialises in arthroscopic (keyhole) surgery for an assessment.

Amazingly we got an appointment within the week, so we took it.

This of course caused a problem, we're quite busy people, especially so this week. but we could manage a day trip without staying overnight. As J has injured her hip, we would have been unable to share the driving - it's around a 600km round trip - and I was reluctant to drive the whole journey given it's winter and often bad weather.

So the train seemed to be the answer. A longer day than driving, but overall less tiring.

So what was it like?

The train was much the same as ever. We've been promised new Vlocity trains, but Covid has delayed their introduction, so it was still the old coaches and loco combo.

Given J's injury, we went first class rather than economy as you get reclining seats and more space. It wasn't quite as extravagant as it sounds as with our senior card discounts (it pays to be old sometimes) a pair of first class returns was only twenty bucks more than economy.

The night before it rained like buggery and it was still raining heavily when we left, which I felt vindicated our decision to take the train instead of driving.

The train was clean, and if it wasn't for the signs reminding you to social distance and wear a mask throughout the journey, it would have been like pre-covid times.

We had been promised a buffet on the train, but in the event there wasn't. Nothing to do with covid, it was just V/Line being V/line.

First class was only half full, and when I walked into economy in search of the mythical buffet and coffee, economy was just a empty, possibly more so.

Despite stopping for about ten minutes to let us admire a view of a rain swept paddock somewhere outside of Tallarook, the train was more or less on time, and I've got to say if it wasn't for a lack of coffee and having to wear a mask, pretty pleasant.

Coffeeless, we jumped on a Metro train to Flinders Street, from whence we went in search of brunch.

Melbourne was noticeably less busy than in previous times, fewer cafes were open, and those that were were less busy. After brunch we went to the big city department stores in Collins Street and J told me the story (again) of when she worked for a fashion house between school and uni of wheeling racks of finished dresses up laneways to the delivery docks of various stores.

Both DJ's and Myer, the only two stores we actually visited, were pretty empty. I'd almost say more staff than customers, and in DJ's all the momentarily idle staff had clearly been briefed to greet customers and say 'Welcome back'.

Then a Metro train out to Epworth hospital and the consultation, which was a reasonably positive experience with a suggestion of an approach that might avoid surgery.

By the time we'd done all that it was a bit after three and the train home didn't go until six. As it was cold and damp we were a bit at a loss what to do so we went to the NGV for a bit.

V/line have a twitter feed for each of their services and helpfully advised that there was again going to be no buffet car on the Albury evening service - for once my twitter obsession had a purpose.

This gave us a problem. Previously it had been quite easy to pick up something reasonable to eat on the train back from one of the takeaway food franchises in Southern Cross station, but, when we got in this morning we'd noticed that a lot of the food outlets - mostly those that do interesting food like sushi, panini and baguettes had gone - leaving only the usual suspects.

So, instant decision, back to Collins Street on the tram and then walk back through the laneways between Collins Street and Flinders street in the hope of finding somewhere for a glass of wine and something to eat.

Despite it being a little before five, a lot of the cafes one might have expected to be open were closed or closing up. Fortunately Cafe Andiamo, where we'd had brunch (it had been meant to be an early lunch, never mind) was open and had tables free, so it was a mushroom pizza (D) and positano style squid (J) and a couple of glasses of wine. Possibly not the best we could have done, but enough to give us that 'Aah' moment before the journey home.

The journey home was tedious.

The train was running late, and it was dark - in fact it revealed that just how extraordinarily dark the Victorian countryside is outside of townships, many of which fairly minimal street lighting.

I'd brought a book to read, but that didn't work as my glasses kept steaming up due to the requirement to wear a mask, so we played with our phones, talked, and played 'I spy with my little eye' among other silly games.

There's no wifi on our current crop of V/Line trains, but one thing I did notice was that on most of the line there's now pretty good Telstra coverage meaning that if we'd actually wanted to use the internet we could have taken our portable internet modem with us.

The train was even emptier than it was on the way down, perhaps a bare third of the seats taken.

We arrived into Wangaratta about twenty minutes late. While there's a connecting bus to Beechworth, we'd driven down to the station and left the car in the station car park for the day, meaning it was only a half hour drive home for a glass of something and some nibbles before bed.

So, how would I rate the experience?

Tiring, in a word.

The precautions against the spread of covid are inevitably irksome, but they are well enforced, and everyone seems to understand the importance of social distancing, mask wearing and hand sanitiser. The trains, and the stations, are clean, in fact cleaner than they used to be.

I'd have no worries about using the train again, but if it was possible, I'd go down the day before on the lunchtime train, take an overnight bag, and stay somewhere in the city rather than do the whole journey in a single day ...

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...

Should have been easy ...

We had a simple plan for a couple of days mid week in Melbourne.

J had a medical appointment and it was three or four days after her birthday, so we thought it would be fun to have a couple of days in the city and take in the French Impressionists exhibition at the NGV.

We booked the train, and booked the cats into the cat motel for three nights as we’d be back too late to collect them.

Turned up at the cattery, and they had lost the booking.

However they had space free so we checked the mogs in. So far so good, and the cattery did call us later to say that they’d found the booking and apologised for the inconvenience.

Then on to the bus to take us down to the train station at Wangaratta.

As always it turned up five minutes late.

However, we had a shock when the bus driver asked us where we were going.

“Melbourne, Southern Cross”, we said. 

“There’s no trains” he said.

It turned out that the trains had been cancelled due to an incident involving the fire brigade.

So off we went down to Wangaratta.

When we got there, V/Line had swung into emergency backup mode.

Our bus, the bus from Beechworth, was going express straight to Southern Cross - we were to stay on board for as soon as they loaded up some of the other people going to Melbourne we were off down the freeway to Melbourne.

V/line did an excellent job sorting the problem and getting us there, but the bus wasn’t ideal, a bit past its use by date, with cramped plastic synthetic leather seats, a tiny toilet designed for a dwarf at the back. It was kind of like being stuck on RyanAir or AirAsia but with less space.

On the way out of Wangaratta, we passed a group of fire trucks and police utes clustered around a crossing on the train line. I’m guessing that whatever the problem had been, that had been where it was.

Despite my quibbles about the bus, it drove at a steady 110km/h most of the way down and deposited at Southern Cross a little before 4.30pm.

Now, we had a little problem. J had lost her Myki card, or perhaps more accurately couldn’t remember where she put it after the last time we came back from Melbourne, so we’d phoned it in a day or two before, reporting it as missing.

Normally they send a replacement card in the mail, but as we were travelling to the city, they had said we could pick up a new one at the Public Transport service centre in the train station.

That worked really well, we showed a nice friendly lady the email saying we had reported the card lost, and she issued J a replacement card on the spot.

That was the good bit. The bad bit was that J noticed in the service centre a big sign saying that trains on the Hurstbridge line were suspended due to a derailment at Clifton Hill.

We’d splurged a bit and booked the Pullman in East Melbourne because it had been J’s birthday a few days before (which was why news of the derailment had totally passed us by) and because it’s bang opposite Jolimont train station on guess what, the Hurstbridge line.

Our idea had been to get the train to Jolimont.

Jolimont station - no trains

Obviously that wasn’t going to happen, and peak hour was beginning to rumble into action, which meant the tram, never a good idea with travel bags, was really not going to be an option.

So we jumped on the train to Flinders Street and grabbed a cab from the taxi rank outside. Ten bucks later we were checking  into out hotel.

So far so good.

Our plan had originally been to go out for dinner, but we were knackered and ended up eating in the hotel, and very good it was too. Not the cheapest, but good.

The next day was dull and cold as it often is in Melbourne at this time of year. We had initially planned to go down to the city centre on the tram, but the day was so grey and dispiriting we contented ourselves with brunch at the East Melbourne branch of Laurent - the people who do a lot of artisan breads and so on - and a walk down Bridge Road and then loop back through the gardens, while J reminisced about living in a flat in Clifton Hill while she was a student and riding her bike to Uni through the gardens some time in the Seventies.

Along the way we stopped off at a pharmacy for something and noticed quite an amazing display of old pharmacists bottles on a shelf above the 21st century display items (ever since I documented Dow’s I’ve had a thing for nineteenth century pharmacists’ bottles and jars…)

Basically, we then continued our wander up Bridge Road - lots of empty shops - and then back to the hotel for an hour or two before J’s medical appointment.

That evening we ate at Gepetto’s trattoria - a wonderful traditional family run restaurant - good solid traditional Italian food.

The next day started out with J having a group call with Canada as part of a specialist art course she’s doing.

After that we rattled down to the NGV on the tram for the French Impressionist’s exhibition - like all NGV winter exhibitions it was too crowded - the NGV really don’t seem to have realised that if you sell timed tickets for exhibitions you should cap the numbers in each time slot, and not allow walk ins to buy tickets at busy times.

The exhibition was good, though not brilliant, a few Monets and Pisarros and the odd Renoir.

There were people taking pictures, but J, being an artist, probably confused people by taking close ups of brush strokes and the like as exemplars of the artists’ techniques rather than the pictures themselves.

Because it had been J’s birthday a couple of days before and it would be our wedding anniversary at the end of the week we treated ourselves to a genteel but overpriced lunch in the gallery and a glass of bubbly, followed by a walk round the new acquisitions and a couple of the other galleries of nineteenth century British art, before catching the tram back to the hotel to pick up our bags and get a taxi down to Southern Cross, the main rail station in Melbourne.

Knowing that V/line’s attempts at catering on long distance trains are sporadic and unexciting we picked up some sandwiches from the Woolworths Metro before boarding the train.

The train left on time, arrived in Wangaratta on time, and apart from a slightly annoying child who clearly had behavioural problems, relatively pleasant.

Wangaratta station was a surprise though.

For the last ten years passenger trains in either direction have stopped at platform 1 outside the old ticket hall. As there’s only three passenger trains each way plus a couple of NSW XPT’s that wasn’t a problem.

However this time it was different. As part of the redevelopment of the line they’s built a new platform, platform 2 surprisingly enough.

Now our connecting bus to Beechworth left, as it always has, from outside the old station building on platform 1 and there was no obvious way from getting from platform 2 to platform 1.

However a kind lady, seeing our confusion told us there was a lift at the far end of the platform (aren’t they always) down to the underpass to save us having to drag our bags round the station precinct.

The bus back to Beechworth was slightly late, but was not crowded and delivered us back home on time.

After that it was a case of putting the heating on, a couple of whiskies and a nibble, and then to bed.

It should have been an easy trip, but the problems, none of which were really anyone’s fault made it more of a hassle than it should have been …

 

The hollowing out of the train service

 A few days ago I vented about the Sydney Canberra train service. 

Since then there's been various reports that the Sydney/Melbourne train service has been enjoying a substantial increase in patronage, basically because flights have become unaffordable for some.

What's interesting is the way that people have to be told about how the train service works - long distance train travel has ceased to be a thing in Australia, and train travel in regional and rural Australia has become the preserve of those who live too far from an airport or who can't afford to fly.

Railways are of course operated by the State governments, and not the Federal government.

Here in North East Victoria, we've just got new trains on the Albury line, shortening the journey time by twenty minutes each way. We havn't used them yet, but while we grumbled about the old locomotive hauled service, it basically worked, getting us there and back in a day when we needed it, even during the pandemic.

V/line is a pretty attenuated service however - our local station in Wangaratta is still in the old 1880's building but has shrunk down to a waiting area with these bolted to the floor benches once only seen in social security offices, a ticket counter and some toilets - not the most welcoming, but it does the job. Strangely, reasonable amount of parking.

V/line shrank nearly to nothing but is now beginning to claw its way back with new trains, track improvements, reopening closed lines and stations, etc, to try and provide a half way decent service.

There's still not enough trains and services are often slow but they're trying and one has to give them  credit for trying to move things in the right direction.

Queensland Rail has also been investing, replacing the old long distance Sunlander between Brisbane and Cairns with a newer modern train with improved journey times.

However, New South Wales, which operates the Melbourne Sydney service and the Sydney Brisbane service is still using 40 year old XPT trains, over track which is much as it was in the early twentieth century.

The result is a distinctly sparse, slow and unreliable service between the three largest population centres on the east coast. However, it's been like that for at least a generation now, meaning that unless you have had experience of a decent, fast, long distance train service overseas, it's what you take for normal. Even if it hasn't always been like that, it's what you expect things to be like.

Fixing the problems all at once is probably impossible, the money is probably not there for track improvements, electrification etc. 

While the Inland Rail project has delivered improvements for the Melbourne Albury line, it's not going to help the improve the line from Albury to Sydney, which is much as it was in the 1880's with sections of single track, nor is it going to help with the line from Sydney to Brisbane.

In the 1980's the then NSW government reportedly wanted to abandon all non metro passenger services. This was not acceptable politically, with the result we have a bare minimum service for people who either live regionally or who cannot afford to fly.

And when patronage increases, there's not enough slack in the system to cope.

I suspect that the NSW government would prefer to invest its rail budget in continuing improvements in the Woollongong/Sydney/Newcastle area - it's where most of the population lives after all.

However, it's not all gloom.

New trains are promised from 2023 onwards, which may help improve matters, but without improvements to the track I suspect that there won't be any marked increase in speed. 

source: https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/projects/current-projects/regional-rail

Likewise without additional rolling stock over and above those older trains being replaced, there probably won't be any increase in frequency of service.

So what's the answer? I don't know. 

What I do know is that while Victoria and Queensland have shown a willingness to invest in their regional services, New South Wales has not, which is unfortunate given that they have control of the Melbourne/Sydney/Brisbane passenger train service ...

How (not) to get to Canberra

 I live in Beechworth, in North Eastern Victoria, but I used to live in Canberra, and I occasionally go back, because, despite being boring as batshit it has big city facilities and people I know.

Normally I'd drive, and it takes about five hours each way, but as I get older (I'm 67 now) long freeway drives appeal less and less, so I thought I'd investigate public transport options.

After a little bit of research my choices as regards overground options come down to

V/Line

• Leave at 0743 on a weekday to get a V/Line bus to Wangaratta train station 

•  Wait for over an hour and get a local V/line train to Wodonga and then a bus to Canberra arriving at 1520

      Basically near enough an eight hour journey, but cheap at under $20 including my senior citizen discount.

Transport NSW

• Bus to Albury at 0945 

•  Wait for an hour for the Transport NSW XPT to Cootamundra
• Connecting coach service to Canberra  arriving at 1730

            Again near enough an eight hour journey and a bit more expensive at a tad under $40 including discounts.

There are other options, but I'm of an age where late night buses are on the same level as sardine class overnight flights. 

Insanely, given that I have a pile of loyalty points with both Qantas and Virgin, it would be cheaper and quicker to get the train to Melbourne and fly.

Sticking with surface transport, the Transport NSW option, while more expensive, seems the better choice simply because half the journey is by train, but if you ever wondered why people drive silly distances, this is it - while there still is a skeletal public transport network, skeletal is exactly what it is ...      

 

 

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 ...

So what to do about the train service?

When we talk about improving train services in Australia we tend to fixate on capital city to capital city services, and the Sydney Melbourne service in particular.

That’s a red herring.

There is no way, within current budgets and using currently available technology that the services between the east coat capitals (Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide) can be improved to make the door to door journey times competitive with flying.

Can’t be done.

So what can be done?

Well it’s not all about capital cities, it’s more about travel between regional centres and capital cities.

People who live in the Newcastle/Sydney/Wollongong strip have an acceptable service. Those living in the larger regional centres outside NSW Trainlink’s Intercity service don’t. Orange, Wagga and the rest have poor or near non-existent services, as does the north coast.

In Victoria, where the population is a little more spread out the situation is better, but not great.

It’s possible from most Victorian centres to get to Melbourne and back in a day, but it’s a long day.

On a personal note, J has a medical condition that requires periodic visits to see specialists in Melbourne, and while we could take the train we usually drive and stay overnight in the city as it’s more convenient and crucially we’re not dependent on a sometimes erratic service.

As to South Australia, I don’t know. Outside of Adelaide there are no passenger trains to speak of, and while there are no large towns, there’s enough of a population in the south of the state that might support a regional service along the Great Western Highway (M1/A8) corridor.

So what to do?

In Victoria, it’s simple – press for more, better and faster regional services and perhaps a shuttle service along the standard gauge section between Ararat and the South Australian border to allow residents in the west of the state connect with the broad gauge Ararat/Ballarat/City service.

If South Australia was minded to contribute the service could extend to Adelaide.

In NSW, a shuttle service from Wagga to Albury to connect with V/Line services might be advantageous, but basically it’s the same as Victoria, more regional services, but given the historic lack of investment in regional services it there’s a lot more work to be done to even emulate V/Line’s current service levels, which will need substantial investment.

Given that it’s the states that run the rail services any campaign needs to be state based. Victoria is clearly persuadable as regards improving services.

It might then be possible to shame NSW into doing something …

My God, the Nationals are in favour!

 A report in today's Guardian, that the Nationals are broadly in favour of an upgrade to the Sydney Melbourne line, with tilt trains and the like, as I reported previously.

If so, this is quite a turn around.

Just before COVID struck, and in the wake of the Wallan XPT derailment, I wrote to our local Federal MP, Helen Haines, about the poor state of the track and its impact on the reliability of the service.

I wrote to our Federal, and not our State MP as the track is operated by the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) which is a Federal entity.

Helen Haines raised my concerns with Michael McCormack, who was Federal Infrastructure Minister, as well as Deputy Prime Minister, and incidentally MP for Wagga.

This is the reply I received

Now, to be fair to Michael McCormack, I only raised my concerns about the performance of the Albury Melbourne V/Line service and not the NSW Trainlink Sydney Melbourne service.

However, I think the tone of the letter suggests that at that time the Nationals were not invested in the idea of an improvement to the overall passenger service.

As always this is complicated as it's the states that run the passenger services and, in this case, the Federal goverment that runs the track ...

Trains (again)

Last week we had two of J's younger UK rellies visit us while on their way round the world.

It was the usual thing, catch up with us, use our washing machine and go on a couple of bushwalks with us.

They're experienced travellers and used to the vagaries of train services internationally in Europe and Asia, and veterans of commuting in the North of England with the appalling trans Pennine service, but even so they were amazed how sparse the country V/line service was, expecting there to be at least half a dozen trains between Albury and Melbourne a day.

The sparseness of the service does beg the question as to how the service will cope  when $9.20 price cap comes in at the end of March - one could imagine the current sparse service being swamped, even locally, with people travelling from Benalla or Wangaratta taking the train to Albury rather than driving.

(Or maybe not, the sparseness of the service may inhibit its use, no matter how cheap the service)

However, Ben and Jen were even more amazed the daylight hours service to Sydney consisted of a solitary forty year old XPT. 

They emailed us after they got to Sydney to let us know they'd survived the journey. Being young they thought the XPT was incredibly retro and cool tho, especially as, with the exception of Scotrail, all of the XPT's UK cousins, the Intercity 125s, have been withdrawn from service in the UK.

I think we might have a bit of a way to go as regards having a decent train service ...

And I caught a bus !

 After my session in Albury Library this morning, I caught a bus back from MaMa to the dealership to collect my car after being serviced.

That may not seem like much, but as public transport around Beechworth is almost non-existent, this was the first time I've caught an ordinary bus, as opposed to the V/line coach service that connects with the Melbourne train, in the ten years I've lived here.

I'm not against catching the bus, it's just we don't have any with schedules that work for me.

Albury, and its twin city Wodonga, straddle the New South Wales/Victoria border.

In theory they function as one urban centre, but thats a theory, not the reality.

The AW city centre to city centre service is operated on behalf of Transport Victoria by Dyson's. The bus leaves from QE II square just outside of MaMa, in the centre of Albury, which is of course in New South Wales. QE II is where most of the buses in Albury end up, and it functions as a bus interchange for the city - and for Wodonga and surrounding parts of Victoria.

If you looked at the timetable and route information displayed you wouldn't know that there were buses to places in Victoria - it's all for Transport NSW buses to Laverton Thurgoona and other Albury suburbs - not a Victorian bus timetable or sign in sight (There's also a direct bus to Beechworth a few times a day, and you wouldn't guess that either- absolutely no information - you just need to trust the online timetables on both the Transport NSW and Transport Victoria sites).

Anyway, being a trusting soul, I stood in the freezing cold and lo and behold, an ordinary green and white Dyson's service bus arrived. 

I stuck my arm out and it stopped, and the doors opened, allowing me to get on.

How to pay for it was the next problem - there's absolutely no information online as to ticket costs, and it was only by using Google's AI search that I found you could pay with money - as in these funny bits of metal you find in the pockets of jackets and coats you havn't worn for years.

And Google was absolutely right.

No contactless, no Myki, no Opal, just cash, and what's more they gave you change.

and you even get a paper ticket!

Fortunately, I'd had a rummage the evening before and found around five bucks worth of change, so it was pretty straightforward.

There's a bus stop just outside the car service centre so the whole process was fairly painless, even if an act of blind faith was required that the bus really left from where they said ....

Phillip Island

 It was J's birthday this week, so we decided on a few days away on Phillip Island to celebrate.

This of course meant no cataloguing at the Athenaeum this week, but, as they say, all work and no play makes Doug a dull boy.

We drove down on the Monday. The weather over the weekend had not been the best and Monday wasn't much better, meaning it took most of the day to get there.

We avoided the city by driving down the back way via Yarra Glen and Cockatoo to Pakenham where we picked up the main road to the south and south east of Gippsland. 

We'd taken a chicken stew a bottle of wine with us, which was a good thing as we arrived in the dark at our AirBnB and it was pouring with rain, but our host had left the heating on, so we hunkered down with a bowl of stew and a glass of wine or two.

The next day the cloud and rain cleared to a windy, sunny, day. 

We'd planned to do a coastal walk, but actually didn't, driving round the island, and then picking up fish and chips from the San Remo Fish Co-op, beautiful fresh fish , and a glass of wine for dinner.

We'll go for our planned coastal walk tomorrow we told ourselves.

We didn't. The local Nordic myth re-enactment society had decided to stage Ragnorok.

We drove over to Wonthaggi to look at the new art space, all the while hoping for the weather to clear.

It didn't.

We drove on to the dinosaur beach at Inverloch in the hope of the weather clearing. The weather got worse and was now doing a decent imitation of the west coast of Scotland with incessant grey cold smirr.

We decided games were off.

However that night we treated ourselves dinner at Anerie in Cowes, and damned good it was too. 

(For some reason a lot of places on Phillip Island are named after places on the Isle of Wight in England, 

there's Cowes, Ventnor and Newhaven, and while there's no Ryde, there's a Rhyl - I've often wondered if someone got mixed up and meant to name what is now Rhyl, Ryde).

On our last day the weather again cleared and we had a bracing walk at the Nobbies, where there were hordes of Cape Barren geese, nesting, sitting on eggs, escorting gaggles of goslings, and occasionally walking out in front of cars with an arrogance that suggested a direct line to God

That, and a second windy beach walk, and we were done.

We ate at the Phillip Island brewery that evening, and the next day we were up early to drive home, almost retracing our route, save that after Cockatoo and Woori Yallock, we headed north through Healesville and up the Black Spur through the fern forests to Alexandra.

We'd bought some sandwiches and a bag of designer chips, somewhat bizarrely illustrated with a photoshopped picture of Nicholas II and George V clutching potatoes and a vinegar bottle,  from a 7-eleven we'd stopped at for petrol outside of Pakenham and had planned to sit in the park and share our picnic with Princess Alexandra, but it was foggy, chilly, and barely 7 degrees, so we ended up huddling in car,

By the time we reached the freeway at Benalla the sun was out and it was a balmy fifteen degrees, giving us a straight run home in time to pick up our mail from the post office and some things for dinner from the local supermarket.

While the weather was against us, we had fun. We might not have done everything we planned to do, but as always with winter trips it's a matter of taking pleasure in small things...