For those in the know, are Metro Tunnel station dwell times expected to be cut in the February timetable?
At the moment, trains seem to be stopping for an unnecessarily long time at stations (30-45 seconds longer than necessary for everyone to alight and board).
Separately, will the trains continue to have to slow to a crawl when exiting the South Yarra and Kensington portals?
From what ive experienced, the south yarra portal isnt that much of a "slow crawl", its fairly fast imo.
On the other hand, the South Kensington portal, i believe, is restricted in speed due to the junction curving back on to the old alignment. i think there are plans to straighten it out allowing for higher speeds into the tunnel although i dont know is that was cut along with all of the other minor upgrades that were cut due to cost blowouts.
As for dwell times, i would expect them to be reduced, the same thing happened last year with the sydney metro, dwell times were around 30-40 seconds for the opening months but have since been gradually reduced as people get used to boarding and exiting the train.
At the Kensington portal the tunnel down trains have to cross the through (to North Melbourne) up track before joining the through (to Footscray) down track. Whereas at South Yarra the tunnel connections are between the through up and down tracks with no crossing needed to join the down track.
yeah ik, but its more so to do with the curve into the tunnel portal
the tunnel scope for Kensington planned that the Tunnel is the mainline, and the current be removed (or #2 downgraded to an emergency alternate).
that means a substantial re-alignment after MM1 becomes full time. Another cost + shutdown, so might not bother for a long time.
The signalling is being removed in June for the Footscray to North Melbourne section so doubt they’d even use it as an emergency seeing as the points will be clipped as well.
while it's sad to see a line abandoned, and more so loosing an alternate route,
the upside is the other 3 lines (Upfield, Craigeburn, Werribee) could be configured as completely independent running from their respective start thru North Melb.
no crosses, no points, nada. much easier to manage across the network as a whole.
At the (South) Kensington portal, aren't the Tunnel tracks crossing/joining the Main Suburban tracks, not the Through Suburban tracks (which head to Newport)?
Maybe they stay for longer because they are every 20 minutes, so nobody misses it.
I'm hoping the dwell times do change, because currently, the average speed between Anzac and Parkville is about 30 km/h.
Like everything in this state, slow as a wet week.
Apparently the kensington end has slow crawl because the correct infrastructure hasn't been finalised yet.
About dwell times, it WILL be reduced. And I hope it happens for the whole network. Reliability has been raised as a whole, however, timetable hasn't been updated to reflect this.
Dwell times will be retained to cater for the major increase in passengers from February.
Trains slow to a crawl at South Kensington because the tunnel is set up as the diverge movement there. At South Yarra the tunnel is the straight track which is why trains enter much faster.
Really, jesus it doesn't take a minute for nobody to alight/board at Arden but yet the train sits and waits.
I don't think I've really noticed excessive dwell times, I timed them on one run and they seemed to consistently only be about 30-45secs, granted it wasn't busy.
45sec is over-cautious, but can understand for early days. No reason to be any different than the usual 20sec everywhere else.
Dwell times elsewhere have been creeping up though.
For instance outbound Sandringham line in peak allows 3 minutes from Prahran to Windsor... so trains sit at Windsor for ages.