And the Whole Train Went - WTF !! ?


For this story, you, the reader will need historical context to understand the punchline

Historical Context bit (if you have lived in Melbourne recently, and understand the recent changes in the Public Transport system you can skip this bit)
In recent years, through a combination of, and since the great influx of people moving to the "World's Most Livable City", the Western Financial Crisis (aka GFC) and the general price of car fuel, inner city car parking, and worsening Traffic congestion, many people have started using the trains to get to work. The increased usage of trains forced the Train management team to change the way trains get into the City Loop, meaning more passengers now have to 'change trains' at outer lying stations in order to get to the inner city "loop" stations. I choose to be one of those disadvantaged public transport users, needed to change from the city bound Werribee train at the North Melbourne station, in order to catch a City Loop train to go only one more stop near my place of work. Flagstaff is that station's name.

Now to describe the event this morning, but this happens most morning in one shape or another...
Each morning I get off the train at North Melbourne station, in order to catch a City Loop bound train. City Loop trains head into the Loop from platforms One and Three, but it is not predictable as too which is the 'next' train to arrive, so the punters linger on the overpass above these platforms, waiting to see which platform will deliver the next train. Eagerly watching the overhead displays, and calculating the time differences a train arriving at Platform One in 5 minutes verses a train arriving at Platform Three in 8 minutes. Simples! Go down to Platform One, but here is the kicker. A train may arrive at Platform Three first, shaving maybe one or two minutes off a total travel time usually measured in tens or hundreds of minutes, but it is a game many people play.

Today was interesting due to two factors; to start with Platform One had a train arriving in 3 minutes, and Platform Three had one arriving in 10 minutes. While heading to Platform One, this changed to have a train on Platform Three in 1 minute, but looking out from the overpass, I could see that there was a VLine train stopped just out of the station, blocking Platform Three, so I headed to Platform One. Sure enough, a train arrived on Platform One (Three was still empty except for the VLine train now passing through it, not stopping) Several hundred punters squeezed into an already full train on Platform One, and there we waited. Meanwhile, a near empty City Loop bound train, pulled up to Platform Three, doors opened, people came out, and several people got on board, doors closed and the train moved into the loop, all the while, the now packed train on Platform One had a 1000 people go WTF ! ? And there we stood still, a train full of losers. After a minute or so, we got a lame apology from the driver, where the mystery of what had just happened was raised and discarded and seemed to be as much a mystery to him about just as much as it was to us. But because we could not leave the Platform yet due to safety fact of the other train in the loop needeing to advance deeper into the loop ahead of us, we waited another couple of minutes, before continuing our journey...I shook my head and smiled. Such is my life.

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