Smells like City Rail Stench (the Nirvana remix)

Woke up this morning at 7.30am and realised i had an important meeting with my manager at 9am about my performance review. Also came to the realisation that if i was late to my own performance review that wouldn't look too good. Rushed out of the house, no breakfast, brand spanking new Navy suit on with light purple shirt, hair gelled up (as best it can be when your running late) - i was determined to look good for my own review.

Rock up to the station and realised that the line for train tickets was at least 100 people deep! It went down the stairs, curled around the fence, and was spilling onto the footpath. Were they buying Rollingstones tickets? Hell no, they were buying weekly train tickets.

I waited 20 minutes and missed 3 trains. Eventually, I got to the front of the queue, and the operator said "Sorry, machine out of order -buy ticket at destination". So you made me wait 20 mintues, and i'm potentially late for an important meeting as well? Frustration.

Disclaimer - buying tickets after a public holiday is not a very good idea. But they need to have a better system in place. In fact they need to just have a better train system overall. So hear me out playa.


The Octopus

They should make it like Hong Kong's MTR (their City Rail name). Its fast, efficient, and clean. It's just awesome. People move quickly, the lines aren't that long. The trains are crowded, but they come so often, it doesn't matter.

Give me my Octopus card anyday! It's just so good, you can get through the barriers by scanning the card instead of putting it through the little slot. Also, its a smart card thingy - you just top it up by putting more money into the card. It just debits your card when you scan it at your destination as it works out where you've been when you first scanned it. This saves a lot of time instead of queueing up.

But you know what, I don't think we could have a system like that in Sydney. In Hong Kong, everything is brand spanking new - you need a complete overhaul to have a system like that. Also, the whole city is pretty compact, as in its not spread out as much as Sydney. In fact, most of the money went down the drain with that airport tunnel and now they are spending billions "untangling the train lines".

For once, Honkies do it better.

Give me the Maglev from Shanghai. That train was da bomb. Maglev stands for Magnetic Levitation, and was designed by the Germans. It runs from the City Centre of Shanghai all the way to the airport. From my understanding, it floats above the train tracks, based on magnetism. Kinda like some Magneto X-Men stuff. It's a tourist attraction in itself. You've haven't been to Shanghai unless you've taken the Maglev and the Arnold Schwarzngger cruise* on The Bund

The coolest thing is its fast. Real Fast. It goes at up to 430km an hour! Serious. I've got a photo with the speedometer. It didnt feel like it until you couldnt see anything out the window. That was crazy. And it cut down like 2 hour trip into 8mins. As Hoi would say, its gangsta. And it was pretty cheap as well and ON TIME. Well if it was running late, the driver could always crank it up to 430km p/h to make up for lost time.

But alas in the words of Biggie:
"It was all a dream/
I used to read MX and 9 to 5 magazine/
City Circle ran like a limousine/
Staring at destination maps on the train wall/
Every Weekday, City Rail never stalled/"

Carl Scully/John Watkins, you did a bang up job. Late trains, broken ticket machines, dirty and dingy carriages, overpacked peak hour journeys, crowded city stations. Unexplained regular "weekend" maintenance. Your constituents are not happy!!!!!!

I'm out like City rail queues,

DJ Ho

* The Schwarzneger cruise is one of a dozen cruises operating at the Bund, the river at one end of Shanghai. I was by myself in Shanghai and after checking out the various options along the wharf, I decided to go on the most legit one. So I took the one with the Terminator 2 poster which said Arnie had been on it. It was also the only cruise with Westerners at the ticket booth. If I was going to get ripped off, I could at least claim Schwarznegger had been on it. It became notorious, as I recommended to Ceclia and she scoured the whole wharf til she found it. BTW this text is deliberately small - so you'll have to squint.