Archive for September, 2015

Baby products and conspicuous consumption

Conspicuous consumption is spending money on items that indicate to others that you have shitloads of money to blow on ‘stuff’ – and the baby products catalog I flicked through the other week was the perfect example of this.

Baby car seat catalog

Prahran station and a pitiful political promise

Leading up to every election, politicians from all parties pull out their wallets and start flinging money around on promises to the electorate – new roads, railway lines, hospitals and schools are a common theme. However during the knife edge fight for the seat of Prahran at the 2014 State Election, the promise was a lot lower budget – an additional exit at the local railway station.

Alstom Comeng 597M departs Prahran station with an up Sandringham service

‘Stepping down’ – Metro Trains new timekeeping swindle

Since taking the reins of our rail network, Metro Trains Melbourne has been known for their pursuit of profit over service provision. The best example of this is station skipping – a practice that first emerged in early 2012 as a way for late trains make up time and avoid fines for poor performance, but soon reached plague proportions. As a result PTV started collecting data on the practice in April 2015, but Metro Trains has already found a new way to fudge their performance statistics – ‘stepping down’ services.

Melbourne trains – which carriage should I choose?

When travelling by train in Melbourne, there is a question that not many people ask – which carriage should I travel in?

Adding two token train services to Sunbury

In June 2015 the final stage of Regional Rail Link opened to passengers, moving V/Line trains onto a new set of tracks between Sunshine and the city, and freeing up space on the existing tracks to run more suburban services. So what happened to the latter?