{"id":177923,"date":"2025-02-20T14:39:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T04:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=177923"},"modified":"2025-02-20T14:40:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T04:40:05","slug":"rail-union-wants-to-shutdown-southern-cross-railway-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=177923","title":{"rendered":"Rail Union wants to shutdown Southern Cross Railway Station"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Rail Tram and Bus Union have been concerned about the quality of the air at Southern Cross Station for some time now. Over the last several months Vibewire has published several stories on the failure of the station to rid the area of killer diesel fumes but is it really the fault of the station’s owners or is it like many other transport issues caused by poor government planning<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written articles and so have others on the effects of the poor air quality at Southern Cross<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The RTBU of Victoria is asking for the station to be shutdown, I can understand why. The air quality is shocking not only for those who use the station but also for those residents living around the station<\/a> who cannot leave their doors or windows open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melbourne is surely the only major city in the world where diesel trains service suburbs of a major International city. This is entirely due to the failure of the Department of Transport and Ben Carroll when he was minster of transport to investment in much needed electrification<\/strong> for the RRL (Sunshine to Wyndham Vale) ignored despite the obvious inclusion into the scope. Indeed the flaws with the development of the RRL whose project managers rejoiced at cutting corners and delivering the project under budget are only now surfacing as the network is strangled with poor design and huge increases in the number of people using the network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a total failure of transport planning policy<\/strong> and those responsible for ignoring the problem for 20 years should be held accountable. Imagine what visitors to our great city must think about the polluted station as they come off the SkyBus and make their way to a Metro Train Service or arrive via rail from interstate? It is beyond embarassing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those who don’t know, the western suburbs of Melbourne, including, Little River, Avalon and Geelong, rely on expensive, environmentally unfriendly, smelly, uncomfortable diesel trains despite the distance being only 25 kms from the centre of Melbourne. The Geelong line via the RRL is the busiest regional line in the state of Victoria followed closely by the Ballarat line also without electrification. Together these two routes make up the busiest part of the V\/Line network, yet the Department of Transport and its Rolling Stock head Ben Phyland continues to buy out of date, diesel powered Vlocity trains adding to the increasing number of services using Southern Cross each and every day. Could this be because he spent 21 years at Bombardier selling rolling stock to operators including the Victorian Government?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any other major city with a rail network between the largest regional and capital city electrification would have already been completed. Actually it was proposed and agreed to be done in the 1970’s but was cancelled. Familiar story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The current government has ignored vital transport projects in the Western Suburbs including the electrification and duplication in part of the Ballarat Railway Line and obvious electrification of the Geelong Railway Line. The government still ignored for calls to restart passenger rail services between Ballarat and Geelong<\/a> two major regional centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until the issue of electrification is tackled smartly and includes the Ballarat and Geelong lines, 200+ daily diesel train services cannot be replaced with electric powered rolling stock which could run on renewable energy. It has become a planning joke in Melbourne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is like most things in Victoria, the root cause analysis is never undertaken or understood and problems are allowed to get larger and larger and when being solved the solution does not work. The solution is not to change Southern Cross Station it is to remove these out of date diesel trains that pollute the environment and cost a fortune to fuel and run. After all, what self respecting and competent city runs diesel trains to their suburbs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After all, what self respecting and competent city runs diesel trains to their suburbs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":119128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,13003,186],"tags":[4239,4598,993,8],"class_list":["post-177923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rail-news","category-southern-cross-railway-station","category-v-line","tag-ballarat","tag-geelong","tag-melbourne","tag-victoria"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177923"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178008,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177923\/revisions\/178008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/119128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}