The Ballarat Line evening crunch

The Ballarat line has seen quite a bit of investment in recent years - building the infrastructure to increase capacity, and running more services to take advantage of that capacity. But there are still big holes in the timetable that I want to highlight, and which should be relatively cheap and easy to fix. 

Repowering Victoria's Railways

How can we eliminate rail's carbon emissions? (via Network Rail)

Previously we've discussed the Reduce, Replace, Repower framework for cleaning up the transport sector, and spoken in general terms about how best to Repower our vehicles - from cars to buses to planes. Today let's take a closer look at how to Repower and decarbonise Victoria's railways. 

Clean Transport 101: Replace

Last time, we discussed how to Reduce overall travel demand. This time, let's talk about how we can Replace unsustainable trips with more sustainable ones. 

Clean Transport 101: Reduce, Replace, Repower

Transport is Australia's third-largest, and fastest-growing, source of emissions. If we're to have any chance of keeping climate change to 1.5°C, we have to urgently clean up our transport system - but how? 

SRL and the Tsar's Finger

The three phases of the Suburban Rail Loop (via MTIA)

Recent coverage of the secretive origins of the Suburban Rail Loop has highlighted the failures of process that have led to the plans we see today, and has led some people to question whether it's even worth proceeding with the project. So should the project go ahead, and if so, what needs to be improved? 

Re-naming Melbourne's Metro lines

The lines of Melbourne's rail network are generally known by their terminal stations, usually out on the fringes of suburbia. The line between Werribee and the city is known as "the Werribee line", the line between Sunbury and the city is known as "the Sunbury line", and so on. This makes sense at the moment, because Melbourne's rail network is very radial - trains start out on the outer fringes of the urban area, they converge at the CBD, and they turn around and come back out again - in many cases after doing a lap around the City Loop. But the shape of our network is starting to change, so we need to reconsider our naming conventions as well. 

Are passenger trains to Mildura worth it?

The T&G Mutual building in Mildura (via Mattinbgn)

A few months ago, the Parliamentary Budget Office released the results of modelling instigated by Liberal Democratic MLC Tim Quilty, who represents the Victorian upper house region of Northern Victoria. Quilty had asked the PBO to cost a proposal to run three shuttle services per week in each direction from Maryborough to Mildura, and to pay for this by scrapping the Victorian Government's subsidy for the Overland. To my mind this is completely the wrong way to go about things - running a train every second day makes it unlikely to be useful for people, and cannibalising the Overland to do it is just petty and unnecessary - but it does at least give us some very useful numbers from which to extrapolate. 

New timetables for the Ballarat Line

With the Ballarat Line Upgrade project in its final push this month, we'll be getting upgraded services once the line reopens. We've known for a while the basic structure of the upgrades - every 20 minutes in the peak, and every 40 minutes off-peak - but as of Thursday night the full timetables have been released, so let's take a detailed look at what they mean for Ballaratians. 

Goodbye Bungaree Loop

Bungaree Station in 1986 (via @railmaps)

The Ballarat line has been shut down for a month from 28 December, as part of the final push to complete the Ballarat Line Upgrade project. This means that the last train to ever run on the Bungaree Loop ran on 27 December, so let's take a look at the history of the line. 

Ten years of the Maryborough line

Friday was the 10-year anniversary of the government reopening the Maryborough line to passenger trains - so now's as good a time as any to take a look at the history of the line, how it works today, and what should happen for the future.

Travel Diaries: United Kingdom (Part 4)

Edinburgh Waverley Station

A Green New Deal for Ballarat

A wind farm outside Port Fairy (source)

Originally published on 02-12-2019 in the Ballarat Courier as The deal that could offer Ballarat's future the most. In light of the recession that COVID-19 will push us into, it's more important than ever to stimulate our economy in an environmentally-friendly way. 

Why service levels matter in accessible transport

Travel Diaries: United Kingdom (Part 1)

Should High Speed Rail be part of a green stimulus?

Australia, and the world, is in the midst of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, and everyone is (quite rightly) pretty focused on the task of actually fighting the disease right now. But it is quite clear that this fight will tip us over into a recession - if not a full-blown depression - and so we're starting to see some early thoughts on what kinds of actions governments can take to get the economy moving once we're in that recovery phase.

Travel Diaries: Amsterdam

So - after wending my way up through Spain, France and Belgium, I'd finally arrived in my new home in Amsterdam. It's taken me a while to get around to writing these blogs, so rather than just my first impressions, I can give my observations collected over the last several months.

Travel Diaries: European High Speed Rail

Partly for environmental reasons, and partly because I want to see more of the countries I'm passing through, I try to avoid flying as much as possible, and prefer to take the train instead. So now that I'd arrived in continental Europe, with its fairly comprehensive long-distance rail network, there would be no more flying and no more investigating airport rail - it's overland High Speed Rail all the way to Amsterdam.

Why the Airport Rail tunnel should stop at Footscray

Travel Diaries: Barcelona

Having left Singapore, the next stop on my trip was Barcelona. I am normally the kind of person who does an obsessive amount of research on the public transport options before I go somewhere, but for this trip I decided to keep that to a minimum, so that - as much as practical - I could experience it firsthand and see how easy and intuitive it was for the uninformed visitor.

Ballarat to Melbourne in under an hour

The launch of the #59minuteballarat campaign

The Committee for Ballarat has a long-standing campaign called #59minuteballarat. They've been talking about it for several years, formally launched it in September 2017, and did their utmost to secure commitments from politicians in the leadup to the November 2018 election. Although there are other elements, the thrust of the campaign is to make it so that there's a regularly timetabled train from Ballarat to Melbourne in 59 minutes every morning, and another one in the opposite direction every evening.