It happened to me earlier this year and it’s just happened again – a missed call from a radio producer wondering whether I was free to chat on air the next morning on the topic of trains. This time around it was ABC Radio Ballarat, who had seen my recent posts on the Ballarat line […]
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 […]
One question I’ve seen people ask many a time is why the Ballarat line loops around after passing through Bacchus Marsh, instead of just running in a straight line. But the answer is simple – there is a bloody great big hill in the way. Going for a ride We start on the Melbourne side […]
One of the marketing lines for Metro Tunnel project is ‘More trains across Melbourne’ – both for the railway lines which will run through the new tunnel under Melbourne, and those which won’t. So how does that work? The PR puff pieces Over on the State Government’s ‘Big Build’ website they give a high level […]
In New South Wales coal mining is big business, with mines hidden beneath ordinary looking forests extracting millions of tonnes of coal each year. However once the coal is removed, an empty void is left behind – and the resulting land subsidence impacts road and rail networks on the surface. This is an incomplete list […]
