Attached:180905W Metro Twitter - Taylors Rd, Keilor Plains, grade separation.
180907F Melbourne 'Age':
- Melbourne Express, Melbourne Southern Cross.
- Rail Futures plan.
180907F Melbourne 'Herald Sun':
- Rail Futures plans.
- energy. with tdu.
- letters, energy. with tdu.
- train, generic.
 
180907F Metro Twitter:
- wheelchair crossing.
- Craigieburn bustitution.
7.9.18 Metro Twitter.
People using mobility devices like scooters and wheelchairs face different challenges when crossing railway tracks. Know what to do before you cross.
The 5.20am up Upfield has been delayed by ~2 0min (vandalism).  There are minor delays to the following citybound service.
Craigieburn, Cranbourne, and Frankston & Stony Point bustitution.
7.20 Werribee line: Delays of up to 20 min (an equipment fault).
- I'm vision impaired. On your Metro Notify app, you can read most of the disruption info from the lock screen, but can the red dot indicating the major delays be seen from the lock screen or do you have to open the app to see the red dot?
- 7.53 is Werribee line in good service now?
- 7.54 Yes, we have no major issues or delays on the Werribee line at present.
Overton Rd Frankston is closed between New St & Wells Rd until 4pm Sat 8 Sept.  Traffic detours are in place.
A massive crowd will head to MCG for tonight's AFL finals match. We've got extra trains & trams. PT is your best option.
16.40 Werribee/Williamstown lines: Minor delays clearing after an earlier [unannounced] operational incident near North Melbourne.
- 16.41 This is BS. I have a doctor's appointment to get to, and now I will probably be late.
- 16.54 every Fricken Friday arvo.
- 17.43 Minor delays (police at Seddon).
- 18.07 Melbourne stops when there's a carcass on the tracks. Far out.
- 18.11 Police demanded that trains be held at available platforms.
- 18.14 It's just removing a carcass off the tracks.  Not sure what's going on. Zzz, incompetent people.
- 18.16 A dog has been hit by a train, so it might be a little longer. Probably at least a further 15 minutes.
- 18.18 People should be allowed to get off the train in these situations.  Being stuck in a box isn’t always pleasant for us humans.
- 18.21 Open the doors that are on the side with no track and let us depart from the train.  Who knows how long this will take and we all have places to be.
- 18.21 Realistically how much longer till the train line is open again ? Any rough guesstimates?
- 18.22 Give us an estimate roughly how long is this going to take?
- 18.24 Any update on time frame?
- 18.26 I'm at South Kensington [where Sunbury trains could stop by wiggling, but don't].  Is there an alternative train which I can take, or station to which I should walk?
- 18.26 Trains have just resumed; delays are clearing.
- 18.28 Trains were stopped for almost an hour. Not surprising given a dog was hit by a train. That usually takes a while.
Buses will replace trains Newport - Laverton via Westona tonight from 20.45 until the last train of Sun 9 Sep (level-crossing replacement).  Werribee trains will run direct Newport - Laverton.
22.22 Richmond: Swan/Stewart St and Olympic Boulevard Entrances are open, with minimal traffic/crowding. Please use all entries.
- 22.41 Current wait times leading into the station are between 9-10 minutes.
- 22.42 So much for extra services; stuck on the platform for 27 min.
- 22.42 Could just open up the barriers and make life easier for everyone.
- Would make it worse.
- 22.51 Current wait time via Brunton Avenue 7-8 min. Please use all entrances.
- 23.08 Current wait time 3-4 minutes.
- 23.10 What about the backlog of passengers at the City Loop stations being left behind because of a lack of Sunbury services and no Craigeburn services?
- Better off walking to Flinders St and catching a train.  City loop services after matches are utter shit.
- 23.12 Minimal crowding at all entrances.
10.42 Fri.7.9.18: IEV100 down through SH.
Friday EM100 down or up at 14.02.Melbourne Express: Friday, September 7, 2018.
8.52:
• There have been a lot of delays scattered across the Metro Trains network this morning. Pakenham and Werribee are the lines currently reporting minor delays.
• No delays have been reported on any V/Line services.
Experts have weighed in on what our public transport system could look like by 2050.
Level Crossing Removal Authority is dishing out free treats this morning to thank people for putting up with ongoing works. If you're at Flemington they're giving away Chobani yoghurt and if you're at Newmarket you'll get some scrummy-looking slices.
7.57 The Werribee line is back to a good service after some major delays earlier due to equipment faults. The Pakenham line has been having minor issues all morning but now seems to be back to normal. Glen Waverley and Sunbury lines have minor delays now.  At least one driver is keeping commuters happy.
A St Louis apartment gives new meaning to "cosy". Its kitchen and bathroom - stove, benches, toilet and bath -are in one tiny room. At 18.5 square metres and $730 a month, it's said to be a steal. The 111-year-old building originally housed 12 apartments that were remade into 50 units, with this studio the smallest.
7.24 Werribee line delays of up to 20 minutes (an equipment fault).
6.52 Upfield line is back to running a good service after major delays earlier caused by vandalism. Now the Pakenham and Sunbury line are experiencing minor delays.
Commuters at Southern Cross Station.  Photo: Justin McManus
6.13 There are already major delays on the Upfield line (vandalism).
<www.theage.com.au/melbourne-news/melbourne-express-friday-september-7-2018-20180907-p5029j.html>
What Melbourne's public transport could look like by 2050, according to the experts. 7 September 2018.
Melbourne does not need a $50 billion suburban train loop by 2050, says the state's key rail institute, but a cheaper orbital light rail, five new rail lines and 21 new train stations.
One week after Premier Daniel Andrews announced plans for a 90-kilometre rail loop, the Rail Futures Institute has released an alternative $100 billion vision mapping out the ways to move 8 million people around the city within the next 30 years.
Commuters at Southern Cross Station.  Photo: Vince Caligiuri.
The state government's current slate of big ticket transport projects were described as "mostly 'catch-up' projects that should have been constructed years ago" in the institute's report released on Friday.
"They will be unable to keep pace with Melbourne’s growth."
The Andrews government's proposal
Rail Futures Institute's alternative
The transport blueprint proposes a $21 billion orbital light rail service from Keysborough to Deer Park, with stops at Monash, Box Hill and Broadmeadows, following a route similar to the government's proposed suburban loop.
Instead of an underground train service, this proposal would see trams, small driverless trains, or even elongated buses use dedicated tracks on median strips, bridges or tunnels, enabling them to travel at faster speeds.
Rail Futures' president John Hearsch said this would be cheaper and faster to build than a traditional train line, and it would include more stops.
"Most of the commuters using the suburban rail loop will travel between two to three stations," said Mr Hearsch, who said underground trains were better suited to crowded services to the CBD.
Light rail would also help link up areas in the west including Tarneit, Hoppers Crossing and Williams Landing, and in the east, there would be a direct link between the CBD and Doncaster and Ringwood and Dandenong via Knox.
Five new train lines
Other ideas in the report include a $69 billion rail plan that would see five new train lines built by 2040.
This includes the Metro Tunnel (built by 2024) and the airport link (by 2027) already committed to by the Andrews government, and the Melbourne Metro 2 linking the Mernda and Werribee lines via the CBD and Fitzroy instead of Clifton Hill (by 2030).
A new rail line - dubbed the “South-East Fastline” - would link Pakenham in Melbourne’s south-east and Wyndham Vale in the west, with new stations at Chadstone and Monash by 2035. The Glen Waverley line would be extended to Knox by 2039.
Five new tram routes:
A $9 billion revamp of the tram network would include five new cross-CBD tram routes and 13 extensions of existing tram routes.
Alexandra Parade's median strip would be converted to a tram route between Smith and Nicholson Streets. These trams would connect Clifton Hill and Melbourne University via Grattan Street and extend to North Melbourne.
New tram routes would run for the entire stretch of Spencer Street and include options to turn into La Trobe Street.
A new tram loop line that would go up Laurrens Street and down Dryburgh Street would service the new North Melbourne station built as part of the Metro Tunnel.
21 new stations
The metro rail network would be expanded on nearly every line by 2030 and 21 new stations built, the institute argues.
V/Line track between Deer Park and Melton would be electrified before the Metro Tunnel is finished, and track between Southern Cross and Wyndham Vale electrified by 2022 to allow, longer, faster trains on Geelong and Wyndham Vale services.
Single sections of track on the Cranbourne, Hurstbridge, Lilydale and Belgrave lines would also be duplicated by 2026.
A previous plan by the Rail Futures Institute to link airport rail to the wider V/Line network rather than just the metropolitan network was adopted by government when it chose its current airport link route.
<www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/what-melbourne-s-public-transport-could-look-like-by-2050-according-to-the-experts-20180906-p5026z.html>
Delays on Werribee and Williamstown lines after dog hit by train.
Herald Sun September 7, 2018.
Trains have resumed on the Williamstown and Werribee lines due to a dog being hit at Seddon station. Generic picture.
TRAINS have resumed on the Williamstown and Werribee lines due to a dog being hit at Seddon station.
Metro Trains is urging commuters to check platform displays and listen for announcements as services may be altered at short notice.
A police spokesperson said the dog was hit by a train.
<www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/delays-on-werribee-and-williamstown-lines-after-dog-hit-by-train/news-story/e67f951ef84e0c33de35802ed610d79f>     Severe thunderstorms hit Sydney amid peak hour traffic chaos. 7 September 2018.
Sydney is experiencing a horror commute home as traffic chaos combines with severe thunderstoms just in time for peak hour.
The weather bureau issued a severe thunderstorm warning for heavy rain, hail and damaging winds hitting Sydney shortly after 4pm on Friday afternoon.
Heavy clouds over Bondi beach. Photo: Brook Mitchell.
Bureau of Meteorology warned heavy rainfall may lead to flash flooding and large hailstones over the next several hours in the Sydney metropolitan area as well as parts of the Hunter, Illawarra, Central Tablelands and Central West Slopes and Plains districts.
video: Thunderstorms and hail meets Sydney at peak hour
Sydneysiders were faced with a surprising spring afternoon of hail, thunderstorms and flash flooding.
The flash flooding and hail have certainly come to pass.
Flash floods have already waterlogged a number of roads and a blanketing of small hailstones have been reported several Sydney suburbs in south-western Sydney.
In Bankstown, 60mm of rail fell in one hour. That's almost as much as the area received in the last three months.
The thunderstorms are the result of a cold front and trough moving off the coast, quite slowly, according to Weatherzone meteorologist Craig McIntosh.
That means the storms, though scattered, are likely to stick around well into the evening.
"It could be hit and miss, but it looks like the heaviest rain and thunderstorms are skirting along the southern half of the Sydney basin," he said.
Pedestrians brave heavy rain on Friday afternoon.  Photo: AAP/Dan Himbrechts.
Along with hail, Sydneysiders should expect some heavy downpours leading to flash flooding, he said. It would hit around peak hour.
The storms are causing even more problems for the Friday evening commute, with traffic already at a standstill on the Harbour Bridge after a motorcycle accident closed the Harbour Tunnel southbound before 2pm. It would be almost five hours before the tunnel reopened.
Police have confirmed the crash took place after a police pursuit, and a critical incident investigation has been launched.
The male rider was treated at the scene and taken to St Vincent's Hospital, where he remains in a critical condition. Nobody else was injured.
Traffic at a standstill on the Harbour Bridge on Friday afternoon.  Photo: Matthew Whitmore.
Motorists are advised to avoid the area if possible, with significant traffic delays as far back as the Lane Cove Tunnel.
Lightning strikes affect transport system
Sydney train services are delayed after lightning strikes damaged equipment at Campsie, while urgent track equipment repairs are also under way at St James.
The issue is affecting services on the T3 Bankstown, T2 Inner West and Leppington line, and T8 Airport and South line.
Light rail services are not running between Taverners Hill and Dulwich Hill because of a lightning strike damaging equipment at Dulwich Hill.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, lightning strikes are hitting at a rate of about 1000 per hour across the city.
10 Images Gallery: Severe thunderstorms hit Sydney
Sydney Airport's domestic terminals are experiencing significant delays as a result of the weather, a spokeswoman for the airport said.
Customers are urged to check with their airlines for updates, she said.
"The airport is continuing to operate as usual. These sorts of weather events are not uncommon but there are delays as a result."
Qantas has cancelled four flights as a result of the weather.
A Qantas spokeswoman said "our operations team, including meteorologists, are continuing to monitor the weather and we thank our customers for their understanding."
For some passengers, delays may be preferable to the heart-stopping thrill of landing or taking off amid frequent lightning strikes.
Related Gallery Kites are flown over Bondi beach ahead of the 40th annual Festival of the Wind as a thunderstorm passes by on 07 September, 2018. Photo: Brook Mitchell.
<www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/severe-thunderstorm-heading-for-sydney-20180907-p502hc.html>'Congestion is a cuddle': Why I welcome Sydney traffic 7 September 2018. 34 comments.
I’m returning from Canberra late one night, snaking up the M5 in the endless stream of tail lights that dives under the airport and over the various strands of the Cooks River before finally slowing to a crawl at the Audi showroom on South Dowling. It’s a marker, this slow-down. Our city gate.
Congestion is buzz. It is energy and vitality.  Photo: Peter Rae.
You’re in Sydney now, it says without pride or apology. And what I feel - leavening the usual frustration – is something like relief. It’s a kind of homecoming, this plunge into air thick with salt and streets thick with humans; a reaffirmation that this, for all its warts, is still my town.
The city coagulates around me, filling my head with images of bohemian Paris and inter-war New York; honking streets, cheap rooms, half-written novels, raised voices, fire escapes, thin walls. I recall a colleague who insisted on driving to work through central London. Yes, she’d concede, her speed averaged under 5km/hr. “But that’s okay. There’s always something astonishing to look at on Oxford Street.”
The frictions and irritations of city life are, in a way, their point. It’s not simply that we don’t need motorways through the city.. It’s that conceiving the city as a thoroughfare could be its destruction. Sydney is a great city not despite its congestion but because of it.
This is why all those liveability lists that pretend cities are part of some giant suburban comfy-competition are so wrong. Cities are not about easy. Cities are about exciting.
Canberra doesn’t do congestion. Canberra and Sydney, although such proximate neighbours, are opposites in the congestion stakes. Sydney came into being as a flawed and faded copy of old London, all opulence drained but crooked inadequacies intact. Canberra, by contrast, diagrammed the future; all smooth and slippy, all flight and freedom. Where Sydney - playing the Flintstones to Canberra’s Jetsons - preordained congestion, Canberra craved only space and speed.
But is congestion such a bad thing? Most people, including most politicians, presume it’s a disaster. But there’s a reason why Sydney has a population of 5 million and Canberra of 400,000. It’s called desire.
Congestion and density were the 20th century’s driving fears (no pun intended). In a world where time is money, speed equals progress. Harry Seidler spent his career lifting buildings off the ground to reduce pedestrian congestion, as well as the vehicular type. But congestion is proximity. Congestion is buzz. It is energy and vitality. Sydney may be an ants’ nest, but our social yearnings make us far more ant-like than we care to think. And Sydney is where we all want to be - not despite the congestion.. Because of it.
Congestion is in fact a sign of good city health, a sign that people want to be there. But more than that, congestion itself draws people. Congestion is a city’s bright eyes and bushy tail.
I hear you scoff. But think about it. Surry Hills, Redfern, Balmain, Paddington, Woollahra - the tightest, narrowest parts of Sydney, the places where two cars can barely pass and rubbish trucks occasionally get stuck, are the most expensive. They’re where a house built as a slum can command three or four million. Why? Because we’re not gods, capable of life undefended. We like the big open, but we also like the tight narrow. We like to get into things. Congested cities are things to be in.
Interestingly, both Sydney and Canberra are now striving to be more like the other. Sydney, determined to decongest, is riddling itself with motorways, wormholes through the apple. Canberra, meanwhile, bored with that (now dated) frictionless future, is attempting to densify, to retrofit a bit of old-school grunge and slummage.
You could see each of these projects either as a city’s doomed attempt to undermine its native DNA, or a noble attempt to counteract it. What are their chances of success? Can such amendments be made? And will they, in either case, yield some optimal, easy-yet-lively city?
Of the two, Canberra’s project has more legs. Although the bush capital starts from a much lower base, and although much of its current boom is misconceived in both planning and architectural terms, its densification will at least improve the place, in freeway-encircled pockets. Sydney’s motorway masterplan, by contrast, driving 10-lane trenches through the fine city fabric, can only make the place worse. But if what they want is a lively, free-flowing city, both will fail.
The reason is surprisingly simple. To design a good city around easy car travel is a logical impossibility.
The attempt to do so produces – well – Canberra, where roads have morphed from servant into served; where even a local road becomes a six-lane speedway, with football fields for median strips wider than George Street and pedestrian-phobic roundabouts at every intersect. Where there’s more going than being.
Greater density will improve Canberra. Photo:aurora.daniels@...
This is a direct result of the car’s space-to-person ratio, roughly 20 times that of buses. Even if you could provide enough road for the free-flow of cars (and induced demand makes this unlikely) that effort would require the asphalting of such an enormous percentage of ground plane as to make city intensity impossible.
So the lively car-based city is an oxymoron. And that’s without factoring in parking or the extra travel demanded by door-to-door transport, or the isolation, road rage and obesity that car-dependence encourages. A city can be a good place to go through, or a good place to go to. It can’t be both.
Coming back to the Sydney and Canberra projects, then. What should they do? It’s pretty simple. For Canberra it’s all about connecting the dots. It should replace every roundabout with lights, remove all slip-lanes, run trams on every median strip, reduce Parkes Way to two lanes and require the proliferating apartment buildings to join hands and make streets.
For Sydney it’s even simpler. Restrict motorways to the outskirts, plough the wasted billions into slinky, sustainable trams and trains, then relax. Congestion is a cuddle. Climb in, enjoy.
Related Article The Sydney suburb where fresh air is a luxury.
<www.smh.com.au/national/congestion-is-a-cuddle-why-i-welcome-sydney-traffic-20180906-p5026u.html> Teenage trio shocked, burned on Gold Coast rail line 7 September 2018.
Three teenagers have extensive burns after they were shocked by high-voltage power lines on a Gold Coast rail line.
Paramedics said the boys had climbed over a safety barrier at Pimpama on Thursday night and were sitting on a bridge when the electricity from the lines arced.
Two boys suffered burns, ranging in severity from full to partial thickness, to half of their bodies. They remain in hospital in serious condition.
The third boy is also in hospital in a stable condition.
Ambulance spokesman Allan Windsor said the teens had done a stupid thing, getting so close to the power lines.
"Apparently what happened is they climbed over the bridge there and sat on the concrete barriers that support the bridge to admire the view," he said.
"The electricity from the high-voltage wires has arced across ... It's very stupid ... they can arc ... that's why they have those safety barriers and fences there."
Queensland Rail chief executive Nick Easy said his thoughts were with the teenagers and their families.
"With 25,000 volts of electricity running through Queensland Rail’s overhead power line network, it is critically important that members of the public do not enter prohibited areas of the rail corridor," he said.
Train services resumed late on Thursday night.
<www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/teenage-trio-shocked-burned-on-gold-coast-rail-line-20180907-p502ab.html>