One of the basic rules of railway engineering is that the tighter the radius of a curve, the slower a train has to travel through it to avoid derailing. I’ve written about the history of the Ballarat line a lot recently, including the construction of a deviation to cut the length of the journey between […]
Parkland has become a hot button topic in the inner Melbourne suburb of Footscray, with 2016 seeing members of the local community lobbying state and local government to allow surplus railway land to be turned over to the public as open space, and not sold for development. But on Buckley Street the government is doing something even more shameful – selling off former parkland as a development site.
In October 2016 Melbourne newspaper The Age revealed that $300 million would soon need to be spent at Southern Cross Station in order to cater for increasing passenger numbers. So why are the works expected to cost so much, and why does a ten year old station already need to be expanded?
With a program of 50 level crossing removals planned for Melbourne, with many of them already underway, one would assume that the last thing that the government would be doing is building NEW level crossings. But yet again, a lack of planning is seeing money go down the drain – this time at Cardinia Road on the Pakenham line.
In the 2016/17 Victoria Budget, the State Government has allocated $518 million for upgrade works on the Ballarat line, making the railway system more reliable and marking room for more train services. Track duplication and building additional crossing loops is simple, but some components of the upgrade are a little esoteric.
