NSW Railway Observations - October 2017

[Liamena]

Having an exclusive bus lane during closures of the North Shore line is a completely idiotic idea.

North Shore line closures occur almost only on weekends. It generally works quite well. The problems I have observed are:

Delays with detours to some stations, Turramurra and Wahroonga in particular.
Drivers who don't know where they are going.
Poor capacity. This is mostly a problem, in my extensive observations, where there is a shortage of buses to carry people from Wynyard around
5 PM on Saturday. This seems to be poor planning, and accumulated late running during the entire day. There seems to be enough
buses at other times.
Poor management at Chatswood. There is no reason to hold a bus carrying a full load of standing passengers from the city for ten minutes at
Chatswood, to comply with some real or imaginary timetable. Send them on their way !
This seems to be particularly prevalent when Ms Shouty and Mr Pointless are on the job.
Poor location of some of the stops, for example Pymble.
Poor signage, particularly in Clarence St. Not sure which imbecile though that tying the corflute signs to light poles at knee level
was a good idea, when they will be surrounded by a throng of confused patrons.
Despite the clipboards and walkie talkies, the bus marshalls have no idea when the next limited stops and all stops bus will
come.

I've noticed poor communications between train staff, station staff and bus operators. A late-night incident about 3 months
ago caused the north shore line trains to be stopped around 11 PM on a friday night. The train staff were announcing there
would be replacement buses. The station staff were simultaneously announcing that there would not be, and people
should call a taxi. None of them mentioned that the first N90 night-ride bus would be along in about 15 minutes....

None of these problems would be solved by an exclusive bus lane.

The biggest choke point between Wynyard and Hornsby is at Turramurra. The traffic jam along the Pacific Highway caused by
Turramurra already extends 3 km in either direction, and buses get stuck in it. Making this situation worse, would not help.
As the Pacific Highway is constantly changing between 2 and 3 lanes all the way along its length, due to the "S-lane" concept,
attempting to create an exclusive bus lane for about 8 buses an hour would not only be a poor allocation of road
space resources, but probably physically impossible. A bigger issue is the stupid need to detour to Turramurra station,
which results in buses getting stuck in Rohini Street for 15 minutes. There is a perfectly good bus stop actually
on the Pacific highway for southbound buses about 80 metres past Rohini Street, which is not blocking the
traffic lanes.

The only other places I have used trackwork buses more than twice, were the Blue Mountains and Central coast
lines. On other lines, once or fewer times. Exclusive lanes might work somewhere else, but I doubt it.

[boronia]

The first section of the new bridge across the tracks at the throat of Sydney Yard was put into place last weekend.