Open House Melbourne

The last weekend of July is usually Open House Melbourne, so I did the rounds of places normally closed to the public.

First off, the underground Russell Place electrical substation.

Complete with mercury arc rectifiers.

Hamer Hall, which was mid renovation.

The former Land Titles Office on Queen Street.

Toured the back of house areas of the State Library of Victoria.

A rooftop garden at 278 Flinders Lane.

The Myer Mural Hall.

Melbourne’s first skyscraper – ICI House.

Up to the top of 50 Lonsdale Street.

And down into the Royal Melbourne Hospital steam tunnels.

Trains and trams

One morning I was on my way to work, and found something odd – a V/Line train being pushed by a suburban electric train!

The V/Line train had run out of fuel at Footscray, so to keep things moving in the lead up to morning peak, it was pushed out of the way by the first train behind.

I found another public transport oddity down at Appleton Dock – a tram sitting on the back of a truck.

The Bombardier-built Flexity tram had just arrived from Germany by sea, and was ready to head for Adelaide to run on the Glenelg line.

But an everyday sight back in 2011 was ticket machines onboard Melbourne trams.

Removed following the decommissioning of the Metcard ticketing system in December 2012, it was originally planned to replace them with Myki machines, but the idea was abandoned in 2011.

Another then-unremarkable view was this one from Wurundjeri Way looking back towards Southern Cross Station.

A pair of office towers now occupy the western roof of Southern Cross Station, the Regional Rail Link tracks now occupy the roadside, and the skyline behind is full of new apartment towers.

Abandonment

A forgettable building in the Melbourne CBD is 405 Bourke Street. Launched back in 2007 as ‘The Foundry’, by 2011 the shopping centre had been boarded up, the original developer having gone into liquidation.

But a decade later things have changed – a new 43 storey tall office development has been built on the site, cantilevered 10 metres over the heritage listed building.

Another unremarkable building was the last remaining part of the West Gate Bridge toll plaza – the abandoned VicRoads control room in Port Melbourne.

Located next door to the tensile membrane roofed service station.

The site had just been sold to a developer, with demolition commencing a few months later.

Warehouses now occupy the site.

Finally, another abandoned site I visited this month was the former Gilbertson’s Meatworks in Altona North.

Empty for years, the site was finally cleared in 2012, and rezoned for residential development – with ‘Haven’ by Stockland and ‘The Fabric’ by Mirvac both under construction today.

And new construction

In 2011 demolition was well underway at the former Myer store on Lonsdale Street.

The facade was still there.

But a wall of scaffolding was on the way up.

Ready to support the building.

While the guts were ripped out of the middle.

Emporium Melbourne was then built on the site, opening to shoppers in 2014.

Footnote

Here you can find the rest of my ‘photos from ten years ago‘ series.

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Down on Spencer Street

For Melbourne Open House 2010 CitiPower opened ‘JA’ zone substation – a key part of the power supply to the Melbourne CBD.

For historical reasons the substation was divided into two – the State Electricity Commission of Victoria who generated electricity controlled the 66kV input.

While the Melbourne City Council Electrical Supply Department (MCCESD) controlled the 11kV output to consumers.

The operations of the substation were merged following the breakup of the SECV – generation, transmission, distribution and retail being the current segments of the electricity industry.

Outside the substation was a big hole – the site of the former Spencer Street Power Station.

Ready for the ‘Upper West Side’ development, which had already erected an elevated display suite.

The heritage listed cast iron water tank being the only remnant of the old power station.

The $550 million development was completed in 2016, containing 2,207 apartments across four towers.

Trains around Melbourne

Metro Trains Melbourne was busy promising more staff on the network, with ‘despatch paddles’ rolled out at City Loop stations during morning and afternoon peak to indicate that the doors were clear.

But the experiment was short lived – abandoned by 2012.

On 27 July a faulty overhead wire cut power between Southern Cross and Flinders Street stations, severely limiting the amount of trains that could move through that section, and causing crowds across the network.

As ‘compensation’ passengers were given a free travel day on Friday 30 July.

Since then, only the 2016 V/Line VLocity train issues have result in free travel as compensation to passengers.

A happier note was early works for Regional Rail Link, with construction of Southern Cross Station platforms 15 and 16 moving along slowly.

2020 marks five years since V/Line trains from Geelong started using the completed corridor.

And out at the Yarra Valley Railway was an even happier day, with local MP Ben Hardman and Minister for Tourism and Major Events Tim Holding attending the launch of regular heritage train services on the line.

Since then the railway has gone from strength to strength, with government grants allowing the line to be progressively restored from Healesville to Yarra Glen.

V/Line services extended to Maryborough

July 2010 also saw the ribbon being cut on the extension of V/Line rail services from Ballarat to Maryborough. The project was announced in December 2008 as part of the Victorian Transport Plan, at a cost of $50 million.

Public Transport Minister Martin Pakula, Premier John Brumby, and Member for Ballarat East Geoff Howard rode the first train.

Creswick was the only station to be reopened in this first stage, with a new platform constructed opposite the heritage listed buildings.

Clunes following in December 2011.

And Talbot in December 2013.

As part of the project flashing lights and boom barriers were installed at level crossings.

And level crossings on minor roads were closed.

The increasing size of trucks presenting difficulties at other level crossings.

But one unwanted ‘upgrade’ was the removal of passing loops at Sulky, Tourello and Talbot – leaving a 60 kilometre long section of single track between Ballarat and Maryborough, and crippling the ability to run freight services along the corridor.

The recent Murray Basin Rail Project attempted to rectify this at a cost of $440 million, but has left the corridor in even worse condition.

Rail freight

On the standard gauge mainline between Melbourne and Adelaide, a new passing loop was being built outside Lara.

Giving a slight reduction in travel times and increase in efficiency for freight trains on the corridor.

However plenty of freight trains were still being hauled by 60 year old antique locomotives.

Such as those moving grain from the wheat belt.

To the Port of Geelong

The intent of the Murray Basin Rail Project was to convert Victoria’s orphan broad gauge network to standard gauge, allowing the use of locomotives from anywhere in Australia, but with the project stalled, today broad gauge freight services still rely on similarly aged rolling stock.

Finally, I headed out to Waurn Ponds, where loaded cement hoppers were sitting in the sidings ready for despatch.

Alongside B-double cement trucks.

In the end the trucks almost won, with the final cement train ran from Waurn Ponds in December 2015 – but in a surprising move, Qube Logistics returned cement traffic to Victorian tracks in September 2019.

And road freight

‘High Productivity Freight Vehicles’ became widespread at the Port of Melbourne in 2010.

These ‘super’ B-double trucks took the place of port rail shuttles, a project forever proposed but yet to be implemented.

These new bigger trucks serve container parks in the western suburbs of Melbourne, with projects such as the $48.5 million Kororoit Creek Road duplication project in Altona North making road transport more convenient.

Work on the project was completed in December 2011, including the removal of a level crossing on the Werribee line.

Another gift to road freight was the $200 million Anthony’s Cutting upgrade on the Western Freeway between Melton and Bacchus Marsh.

Requiring a massive cutting west of Bacchus Marsh, and new bridges across Djerriwarrh Creek.

The upgraded freeway opened in June 2011, making it even easier for trucks to replace trains on the Melbourne-Adelaide corridor.

One step forwards, two steps back?

Footnote

Here you can find the rest of my ‘photos from ten years ago‘ series.

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The relevant portion of the article is this:

Metro’s five-year plan includes a target to cut power use by 10 per cent for each kilometre of train travel. It aims to achieve this through the use of regenerative braking technology, which uses a train’s motor and brakes to put power back into the overhead wiring to be used by other trains.

But little progress has been made in the two years since it put the power-saving proposal to government, with the high cost and practical difficulty of applying the technology to Melbourne’s rail system being blamed.

Metro said a computer simulation on the hilly Lilydale line had shown the energy regenerative braking technology would save electricity.

”This showed that once the technology is affordable, a business case can be made so that it’s commercially viable,” spokeswoman Larisa Tait said. ”The technology is in its infancy and is currently very expensive and we are waiting for the cost of the storage units to reduce.”

Additionally, many of the electrical substations that help power the network and which were built in the 1920s when Melbourne’s rail lines were first electrified are not equipped to handle regenerated electricity.

On the subject of regenerative braking, the spokesperson at Metro is poorly informed – the technology is well proven overseas and widely deployed, as this 2007 article from the Railway Gazette details how Japanese railways have taken advantage of it:

Regenerative braking became popular for normal service braking even in the DC traction era of the late-1960s, when field chopper control was introduced by many private railways. Metros followed in the 1970s when armature chopper control was introduced. In the 1980s, AC traction motors replaced DC motors for almost all EMUs and regenerative braking capability became inherent in the power control circuits. Except for special circumstances, dynamic braking where energy is dissipated in resistance grids was abandoned because of the additional weight, cost and potential danger of fire.

In addition Melbourne existing Siemens and XTrapolis train fleets are already equipped with regenerative braking, but unfortunately in Melbourne it isn’t used as intended – most of the time the energy captured from the stopping train is thrown away because no other trains are around to accept the current.

The Railway Gazette has more to say on the issues facing the reuse of energy:

In regenerative braking the current is returned to the overhead line or third rail. Until relatively recently, regenerative braking was mainly employed on DC electrified lines. However, braking is dependent on the ability of other trains on the same route to accept the current. This is known as receptivity and is affected by a number of variables, including location, traffic density and line voltage. On a busy suburban service at peak times receptivity can be as high as 15%. On a line with long sections between stations and low service frequency it can fall below 5%.

Early implementations of regenerative braking used large resistor grids in the substation to ‘burn off’ surplus power from the system as heat, which increased the receptivity of the overhead system, but with the side effect of letting the generated energy go to waste.

However, a solution to that problem is on the horizon, and this might be the ‘technology is in its infancy’ that the Metro spokesperson spoke of. Trials of batteries at substations for energy storage have been carried out in the USA, as have flywheel based systems onboard trains, and supercapacitors onboard trams.

So what about the comment from Tony Morton, president of the Public Transport Users Association?

We still operate a 1920s vintage power-supply system for our trains. Fifteen-hundred volts DC was state of the art when it was first put in, but virtually all of the other 1500-volt DC infrastructure around the world – or certainly in the developed world – has since been upgraded to the contemporary standard.

That is a half truth – three major users of the same 1500 volt DC system used in Melbourne are:

• Shanghai Metro – the longest metro system in the world
• Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway – the go to example of how to run a railway
• Japan’s commuter railways – famous worldwide for on time trains

Stating that Melbourne’s choice of railway electrification system is holding us back makes as much sense as saying that traffic lights hold back our road network – both are technologies perfected decades ago, and both have limitations compared to the latest developments, but pretending they are the reason for Melbourne’s transport network being in the stone ages is a misinterpretation.

Footnote

Despite what I have written above – Melbourne’s rail network does rely on a clapped out power supply system – the following figures are from a 2007 report on the issues and challenges facing it:

Franchise renewals per year, as fractions of total:

• AC circuit breakers: 3 out of 126 (2.4% pa)
• Rectifier units: 2 out of 81 (2.4% pa)
• DC circuit breakers: 10 out of 457(2.2% pa)
• Signal transformers: 1 out of 67 (1.6% pa)
• Frequency converter units: 0 out of 6 (0% pa)

If design life is 30 years then 3.3% pa is the benchmark.

And the problems caused by a lack of infrastructure renewal:

• Increasing maintenance debt
• Maintenance level does not account for increasing capacity
• No augmentation to match future demands
• Compounding factors: maintenance debt + no capacity increase = High level of deferred costs

Deferred maintenance of railway infrastructure – where have we heard that before?

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