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.

N Class Bingo

N465 City of Ballaarat at Southern Cross Station

A bit of a gunzelly/trainspotty post for you today.

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.

How best to remove the level crossings in Deer Park?

Project map (via LXRA)

Just before the 2018 election, the Andrews government announced that if re-elected they would remove three level crossings in Deer Park, as part of their second tranche of 25 level crossings. Somewhat unusually, the Level Crossing Removal Authority (LXRA) announced the preferred method of removal for all three almost immediately. These crossings are all on the section of track shared between the Ballarat and Geelong lines, and I also used to live in Deer Park right near them, so I'm keen to make sure they're done right – and the City of Brimbank is doing early consultation on the project, so now seems like the right time.

I'll get the uncontroversial ones out of the way first, then get stuck into the one I think needs to be changed.

Travel Diaries: Singapore

The first stopover on my trip to Amsterdam was Singapore. I was pretty keen to break up the journey a bit, rather than just having one long direct flight, so that I could see some places along the way. I've wanted to visit Singapore for quite some time now - for one thing, I do love a good dense city, and for another I'm fascinated by the whole city-state thing and how that compares to more conventional city-and-hinterland states. (There's also a bunch of cultural and historical stuff I wanted to see, but let's focus on the urbanism for this blog).

Introducing Travel Diaries