travelling allrite

I would have gone out of my way to avoid this Red Rattler suburban train when it was in operation, but here I am going out of my way to ride in one.  It's the Transport Heritage Expo at Sydney's Central Station. There are stalls, an operational C32 steam locomotive and 86 class electric loco with cabin tours, steam train rides down to Hurstville and back and the Southern Aurora parked at a platform. The latter will always be associated with pandemics to me. I was really sick with the flu that was going around on my first trip to Sydney, aboard a sleeper on the Southern Aurora back in the the early 1980's.  I was here to catch a heritage electric train ride. Initially it was supposed to run to Lavender Bay, down near Luna Park, which would have been fantastic as you can't normally catch trains there, being a storage branch. Unfortunately, that was kyboshed by the authorities and replaced with a return run to East Hills. I had already caught that line in from Padstow, alt...

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...