Skip to main content

Buses and bursts

To cut a long story short, I didn't fly back from Canberra to Sydney. I took the bus instead. No lounge, no meals, no Boeing 717. Just a three and a quarter hour ride under some stormy skies.


I watched aircraft fly overhead out of Canberra to Sydney and I imagined myself on them. Nice views of the big clouds of cumulus starkly outlined in the evening light. But then I saw the storm on the radar striking Sydney Airport at the same time as my original flight was due to arrive and felt glad I was not on board. Later I spotted deviations in the flight path, no doubt skirting storms.



Another colleague who shares my name and original work location was also flying back from Canberra on the flight before mine. I asked him how it was like and he said it wasn't bad, only a little bumpy arriving back into Sydney. But his name had caused confusion with our travel agent and the bus seemed easier than a rebooked later flight.

The bus was comfortable enough and I just sat and stared at clouds while listening to music. I got off at the International Airport stop. As I was waiting for my train a test train consisting of a hybrid between the older silver city electric trains and some Southern Aurora carriages raced through the station. Never seen that before!


It's storm season now, not a good time to fly. And with such short flight times between Sydney and Canberra there is no payoff. Maybe the land based alternatives are best for now.

Comments

Anonymous said…
That photo looks like it is the "AK" track recording which were converted from Southern Aurora carriages - see http://www.robertstrains.net/history.html
allrite said…
That's great information. Thanks!

Popular posts from this blog

Ho Chi Minh to Hoi An

The easy way to get to Hoi An from Ho Chi Minh City is to fly to Danang then go via car for the final leg. Then there's my way. We had to wake at 5.30 am to get ready for a 6.15 departure from the hotel. A hotel car took us the few kilometres to the domestic terminal at the airport, where we checked into our Vietnam Airlines flight to the central Vietnam city of Hue. The airport was nothing flash, but it seemed functional. Alex had sandwiches (refused banh mi) for breakfast, then we went to the gate. Our blue Airbus A321 was parked at a remote stand, which necessitated a packed shuttle bus ride. It was nice to be aboard a full service airline again, even if the service was just a cup of water. We took off over the hazy skies of Ho Chi Minh City and for most of the smooth flight were cruising over a carpet of cloud. We descended over mountains poking their heads through the cloud, across lakes and paddy fields and over the beach. It was lovely scenery.

The Carlingford Line

We close the year and the decade with a local adventure to mark the closure of a railway line. On the January 5, 2020, the Carlingford Line from Clyde will close to be partially replaced by the Parramatta Light Rail. This is Sydney's quietest line, a single track branch for most of its length from the industrial centre of Clyde to the northwestern suburb of Carlingford. According to Wikipedia, power supply and signalling issues mean that only a single four car train can utilise the line at a time. Newer Sydney trains run in fixed eight car configurations. This will be the first and last time I traverse the Carlingford Line in its current configuration. The weather of the day is certainly appropriate for an ending, the brown smoke haze lending an apocalyptic air to proceedings. I drive to Padstow and catch the T8 line to Central, followed by the T1 towards Parramatta and Penrith. The historic homes of the Inner West give way to industrial complexes, rail storage yards and t

A lazy day at the beach

It's 2am and somebody is still setting fireworks off on the beach in front of the hotel. I can't see the explosions as I have the window shuttered, but I can still hear them. I've wanted to have a lazy day and today was the closest I got. I woke up in the night from a very sad dream. Dreams follow crazy paths, but this one resolved itself as so. An entity had been causing disruption of computer systems around the world. It turned out that this entity had emerged from the computer networks and had been struggling to gain access to more computing power so that it could live. The entity had taken on the persona of a woman. The protagonist who had "defeated" the entity discovered that it was alive, spoke to it. Ultimately fell in love with her. But his prior actions would lead to its death. As a gift to her he downloaded his memories so that she could experience life even as she died. I know it sounds like a pulpy sf or technopunk plot, but dreams are about feelings,