A few months ago on platform 13 and 14 two portable light towers appeared – each is powered by a diesel generator in the base, burbling away all night long.

Once the sun goes down, the new lights leave the platform with an acceptable level of brightness.

Once upon a time the entire concrete deck that forms the roof of platforms 13 through 16 was illuminated.

But for some reason, these lights seem to have gone dark.

The exception being a small station at the Bourke Street end of the station.

So are the lights at Southern Cross Station broken, or is something else going on?

One possibility

Over the past year or so the new 699 Bourke Street development atop the western end of Southern Cross Station has been taking shape.

Have the works atop the station required that the lights on the ceiling be switched off for safety reasons?

May 2016 update

Still broken!

October 2016 update

An ‘interim lighting solution’ will be installed at Southern Cross platforms 13 and 14.

The solution is a mix of LED floodlights and fluorescent batten lights fixed to existing vertical supports, powered via aerial hung cables 3 metres or so above the platform.

I wonder when a permanent fix will be put in place?

January 2017 update

The LED floodlights didn’t last long – some of the fixtures on platform 14 have already failed.

What will happen first – another ‘interim lighting solution’ failure, or installation of a permanent system?

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The one thing that stuck me as odd was the vast proliferation of diesel generator sets at site offices along the route.

The above photo is at West Footscray, where the site compound for the relocated railway station is only a short distance from the street. On a greenfields site away from any existing services, it is common to use a portable generator due to the cost involved to bring mains power to a temporary building that will be demolished in a few months, but in the case of Regional Rail Link many of their offices are right next door to existing infrastructure.

Over in Sunshine the site compound at the KG Chaplin Reserve is next door to an existing sporting pavilion, and is another example of using a diesel generator instead of mains power.

Things start getting weird on the other side of the tracks at Sunshine, where a mystery building in the railway station carpark has a cable running out of the wall into a trailer-mounted generator.

But the least logical deployment of a portable generator on the Regional Rail Link project is at the Footscray station site office, where the diesel engine is running 24 hours a day despite mains power being available a few metres away on Irving Street.

The most logical explanation for the site compounds ignoring mains power is simple urgency – why bother doing a survey of each site to see if power is available nearby, then call up the local electricity utility so they can hook up mains power sometime in the next few weeks, when you can call up a hire company and have a diesel generator on site and ready to go the next day.

Whatever the reason for their proliferation, using generators makes a mockery of the ‘sustainability’ motherhood statements that are so popular on construction projects these days, and the cost of fuelling those generators for months on end can’t be cheap either.

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