NZ Trains
There are 9 entries for the tag
NZ Trains
Ok, it's not that exciting really, but it was pretty funny.
One of the neat things about riding to almost the end of the line is that you never have to worry about missing your stop - unless a lot of alcohol is involved. Unfortunately that's not the case for every other passenger.
The "express" train (both of them - the one in the morning, and the one in the evening!) skips all stops between Newmarket and New Lynn. What that means is that a few people also use it for transportation between Britomart and Newmarket, because a train is a...
In a somewhat strange and sneaky move, the Western line train service has been quietly improved while I wasn't watching! There is now an extra train running in the evenings on Weekdays, making late(r) night drinking sessions semi viable. Amazing that they did it without much publicity - they really should be making more of an effort to mention when things improve (especially after today's points failure at Britomart, but lets not mention that). It also seems we're a step closer to having a "real" train system, I.e. one with swipe gates and actual tickets! We live in interesting...
Frost by itself isn't anything too amazing or interesting. However, when it's in Auckland, and when you can scoop it into a pile and almost make a snowball out of it, then you can say "It's cold today" and feel somewhat justified.
Tags: NZ, NZ Trains
I threw the leg times for an end to end trip (specifically, the first train of the morning) on the Western line in both directions into a quick Excel spreadsheet, and can now reveal the following useless statistics:
There are 18 stations and therefore 17 legs along the western line.
The most common leg time is 3 minutes. There are 9 eastbound legs which take 3 minutes, and 12 westbound.
There are 7 legs in which the durations for the eastbound and westbound legs differ.
Of the 7...
I was looking through the new timetable for the Western line and thought I'd noticed a screw up in the train times. The trip duration eastbound looked like it took longer than it used to.
That was until I checked the old timetable, and realised that apparently it takes less time to travel from Britomart to Waitakere as it does to travel from Waitakere to Britomart. I'd never noticed this before!
The eastbound trip end to end (non express) is listed at taking exactly an hour, whereas the return trip is listed as taking 57 minutes...
Today was a fairly significant milestone in the double tracking of the Western Line, with the new track opened up all the way through to Henderson.
In this article, Newstalk ZB decreed that the entire line has been double tracked. I'm not sure if their definition of entire means 'the entire line (apart from 4 stations)' or whether they consider that finished means 'no tracks, no second platforms, but some digging has been done', or whether they just screwed up. (Note that the entry could have been fixed by the time you read it, if you do, because...
I'm back to taking the train after driving for a couple of months. It looks like the reliability issues have gotten a bit better since their alltime February/March lows, however there are still delays and they're still (apparently) being caused by signal failures. It looks like most of the major earthworks have been completed along the western line, and so from here on in things should be getting better.
One thing which has surprised me a lot over the past few days commute is that the trains seem noticably busier. I'd actually expected their use to maybe...
Or at least that's what we were told. I figured I'd buy a few 10 trip tickets a week ago before the price went up, to no avail, as they'd sold out. Back then I thought 'No matter, plenty of time before the increase' and went back on Friday to pick some up. This time, they had tickets, however they refused to sell them to me because 'the prices rise on Sunday'. So really, the prices rose a long time ago. Excellent. Yes, I could possibly have gone to another vendor, however there aren't any others near me (which...
The train arrived on time only to be delayed for 15 mins at Henderson, which is common and happens a lot. However there were then a series of 5-10 minute delays between various stations, to make the usual 40 minute trip take a grand total of 1 hour and 20 minutes. Excellent start to the year, I hope this isn't how things are going to continue.
On a related note, I had a read of the October 2006 train planning information booklet the other day. It made for some interesting reading. It's filled with their projects planned over...
About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.
I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino
is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.
I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services,
and Ignition Development.
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