One point often missed regarding level crossing is that rail passengers also get stuck waiting at them – leaving them stuck on the wrong side of the tracks and missing the train they were trying to catch. An example of this is Yarraville station, as I found a few years ago.
There are plenty of thoroughfares called Franklin Street in Melbourne, but the most notable one is located along the top end of the Melbourne CBD, connecting the Queen Victoria Market in the west to Old Melbourne Gaol in the east. Meanwhile outside Southern Cross Station is an abandoned railway signal box, with the name ‘Franklin Street’ on the side. So how are the two linked?
Removing level crossings is the current flavour of the month in Melbourne, as the continuation of a long and close process to separate road and rail traffic, but it raises a question – how long since the last brand new level crossing was built on a greenfields site?
In recent years Carnegie has been a suburb full of cranes and construction – the apartment blocks came first, followed in 2016 by the replacement of the level crossing by an elevated rail viaduct dubbed ‘Skyrail’.
