Re: Sydney Metro - Observations of an 80 year old.
TP
Tuesday, August 27, 2024 12:10 AM
Gadigal was deliberately not intended to be an interchange with Sydney Trains - something to do with the capacity limitations of Town Hall I believe. The interchanges are Martin Place, Central, Chatswood and Sydenham. When Metro West is open, Martin Place will be part of what is apparently one of the largest underground interchanges in the world, linking ESR Martin Place, metro Martin Place, metro Hunter Street and Sydney Trains Wynyard, not to mention the tram on the surface. There is already a barrier-free link between the ESR and metro at Martin Place.
The Bathurst St entrance to Gadigal is on the southern side of Bathurst, between Pitt and Castlereagh. The reason the platforms are so far apart at Martin Place and Gadigal is that the two tracks are a block apart through the city - one running under Pitt, one running under Castlereagh.
Talking of air-raid shelters, I remember in my youth that there were still air-raid shelter signs in place at Town Hall and Wynyard, which I found rather odd as the roof of these stations is literally the street above. Anything that penetrated the street would be right in amongst the crowd underneath. Even deep underground stations were not immune, as the tragedy in Balham in London showed.
Tony P
On Tuesday 27 August 2024 at 09:27:46 UTC+10 Matthew Geier wrote:
On 27/8/24 01:50, Michael Lewis wrote:
> . One more note, the automatic trains stop with a jolt. The Tangara I
> caught at Martin Place, straight after - a nice connection - had a
> driver who made a perfectly smooth stop. --
>
The ATO selected by TfNSW from Alstom is not the best example of the
state of the art in GoA4 automation. I assume TfNSW specified 'tried and
proven' system, so we got something older. Only they they then also
specified 100km/hr top speed instead of the usual 80km/hr and messed up
all the implied heuristics the system collected over the years in
service on other railways.
They had to spread out the speed code steps to cater for the higher top
speed. This appears to have messed up the braking profile. Also I don't
think their choice of vendor for load cells to measure train weight was
good - the trains appear to have trouble adjusting to changing weight of
their load. This is old mature tech, they shouldn't missing their
braking targets at all.
Siemens got the O&M for Metro West and the airport. My experience riding
other GoA4 lines is the Siemens/Invensys system has a much better
auto-driver.
The trouble with the human drivers, is not all take pride in their train
handling skills. A driver who cares about their craft will beat
automation every time, but there are not enough of them to operate a
network.
One of the public reason Singapore went to GoA4 wasn't to save money on
train drivers, it was because they had trouble 'recruiting train
operators of the calibre they expected'. The job offered just wasn't
attracting the kind of people they wanted.