It’s been 3 years since I compiled 50 years of Overland Patronage, and in the absence of any public patronage updates since then, I contacted Journey Beyond directly to request the recent figures. Much to my surprise and gratitude, their data analytics team responded within hours with an extremely detailed …
In September 2014, the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics released a fascinating report, Long-term trends in urban public transport, the core of which was a detailed reconstruction of the public transport patronage for Australia’s capital cities. It’s now been over a decade since BITRE updated this dataset, so I’ve …
“Globelink” was a late-2010s proposal by the South Australian Liberal Party to modernise the state’s supply chain through targeted infrastructure investments. The ambitious program aimed to integrate road, rail and air freight services at a new intermodal freight super-hub at Monarto, 50km southeast of Adelaide, relieving urban road congestion and …
September results for Amtrak’s new Borealis service between Chicago and Minneapolis/St Paul are out, representing its first full summer holiday season. Monthly patronage has taken a sharp downward drop for the first time, from 22,300 the previous month to 18,800 – almost back to the same rate from its initial …
Through a mixture of necessity, hope for the future, and in some cases pure accident, Australia has ended up with more than its share of long railway platforms. The story of these platforms – when, how, and most importantly why they came to be as long as they are – is the story of rail in Australia.
I recently applied to TfNSW for the entry and exit data for the 94 stations on the regional NSW network for the five calendar years 2019-2023. The data gives us some interesting insights, including an estimate of interstate patronage by station.
Hot Rails presents the largest and most comprehensive survey ever made of rail’s market share against air travel, with 219 datapoints covering 133 unique city pairs across five continents. It shows rail can be a significant player even at longer travel times, becoming dominant for trips four hours or less.
It recently came to my attention that many of the older Hot Rails posts, including all of the original Sydney-Canberra concept alignment sections, were no longer loading properly, either showing just a header image and title but with otherwise blank content, or returning an error message. The bug seems to …
In September 1975, nearly a decade before the CSIRO’s famous white paper that eventually became the Very Fast Train Joint Venture, the South Australian Railways quietly released the findings of “Project Peregrine” – a proposal to upgrade the rail corridor between Adelaide and Tailem Bend to a modern, mixed-use fast-freight …
