How to fix up Flinders Street

Cross-posted from "A World Class Transport System for Victoria", which I've been working on since 2008 or so and which has been about three years from completion over most of that time.

It's all in stuttered point form because that's the way I like to write. Laconic. Terse. To the point.

Heritage restoration

Dismantle clock tower, domes, platform canopies and ironwork, main entrance clocks and interior pressed metal fittings. Completely restore them and document any details lost from the original plans. Demolish existing building, platform structures, concourse and underpasses, including main Elizabeth Street sewer, and build new facilities to modern building codes, with equivalent function (but higher capacity), in approximately the same location as today’s.

Transit oriented development

Build three storey transit oriented development covering entire station area (St Kilda Road to Elizabeth Street, Flinders Street to Yarra River walk track). Replicate the original facade and apply restored interior fittings to the new structure, with replicas to make up additional quantity. Space allocation:

• G (Elizabeth Street level): platform access only, with replica cellars along Flinders Street, designed for use as service-industry retail outlets
• G1 (St Kilda Road level): station concourse (see below)
• 1: Retail development, with food court along south side incorporating panoramic windows overlooking Yarra River
• 2: Commercial office space
• 3: Residential development
• Roof: Recreation lawn and swimming pool
• Main dome: Public event space
• Clock tower: luxury hotel suites incorporating self-guided technology museum of station clocks

Main entrance and concourse (“Under the Clocks”)

Build fast food outlets around perimeter of concourse to avoid impeding passenger flow.

Elizabeth Street entrance and underpass, including Sir Robert Risson tram terminus

Build walkway 20m wide with DDA-compliant ramps to platform level. Apply PIDS screens on walls to avoid hanging signs, thus reducing requirement for depth. Build two platform tram terminus in underpass, for better interchange with heavy rail services. Fence off 4m wide section on west side of tram terminus for bike track connecting Yarra River with Flinders Street.

Degraves Street entrance and underpass

• Build walkway 10m wide with stairs to platform level (DDA compliance is not required as the Elizabeth Street subway and main concourse will be sufficient for mobility-impaired passengers).
• Apply PIDS screens as per Elizabeth Street underpass
• Add another exit for direct access to the tram stop on Flinders Street

Main Platforms

Build DDA compliant platforms and apply heritage platform fittings, using replicas for any of the originals deemed impossible to restore. Platform 1 will be in approximately the same position as today’s; other platforms will be at different positions due to elimination of middle tracks and increased platform width.

• Platform 1 (5m wide, 600m long, incorporating current Platform 14): Spare (broad gauge)
• Platforms 2/3 (10m wide, 160m long): Clifton Hill Group and Burnley Group via City Loop
• Platforms 4/5 (10m wide, 160m long): Northern Group via City Loop
• Platforms 6/7 (10m wide, 160m long): Caulfield Group via City Loop; interurban services from Broadmeadows forming services via Caulfield
• Platforms 8/9 (10m wide, 160m long): reverse of Platform 7; interurban services via Footscray forming services via Ringwood and Epping
• Platforms 10/11 (9m wide, 160m long): reverse of Platform 9; Sandringham

The Angelico Anglo-Austrian Adventure - Arriving again in Australia

Flying in a 787 is much less stressful than any other affordable option. There were no complains about ears popping, air conditioning dessicating or tiny windows inducing claustrophobia. But humans aren't designed to sit in one position for eight hours, and movies are of limited value as a form of entertainment.

Our stopover in Dubai was very brief - straight off and straight on again. Midga is getting a runny nose, if he's not well enough to go to work on Monday that's going to look a bit suspicious!

Brunei is still under refurbishment. Seeking drinking water Midga goes first to the shops, and then to the toilets. Both prove fruitless - the shops only sell hot drinks (at exorbitant prices, even by airport standards) and the toilets are in a state of cleanliness somewhere between Blackburn and Flinders Street.

We got the same plane (but a new crew) for the last leg to Tulla. We're in the aisle and middle seats of the starboard side of the plane this time, not the middle section, so we can watch the passenger next to us play with the window dimming control. Pity it's dark out. Hopefully there's an early dawn.

Midga and I get in a good game of OpenTTD during the flight but there's no in-seat power so that only lasts as long as my battery. At the end of my tether it's still dark outside, but we're passing over generally familiar territory. The maps on the in-flight entertainment units have a really weird way of choosing which cities to show, so Midga has a bit of fun working out where we are in relation to (say) Mildura when the only towns shown are Adelaide and Donald.

We start our descent between Seymour and Shepparton, and on the way down Midga could pinpoint Craigieburn, Caroline Springs, the city, Highpoint and Essendon. The landing is one of the best we've had so far and then it's a quick run on the Skybus and we just walk across the street to get home!

Once again ladies and gents it's been a pleasure to be your correspondent on the spot. Please wish Midga and Asha a smooth transition to normal life (for various definitions of normal) and many pleasant honeymoon memories.

The Angelico Anglo Adventure - Aviating Back where we Came on a Dreamliner Extraordinare

Abandoning my addiction to awkward alliteration, I woke the humans right on the crack of 10:30am and made them pack their bags. Before leaving they spent some time taking selfies with Shelly, which seems to be a good way for humans to deal with the whole being-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-world thing.

We took the bus to the tube station, and boarding the bus with baggage is just as hard as it was on the way in - it wasn't just because they were jetlagged. From my vantage point inside Midga's backpack I could feel every acceleration and deceleration, and if I had inner ears I would have been quite seasick.

On the tube there was more room, since it was off peak time, and we made the trip without incident. Changing at Acton Town for the Piccadilly line to Heathrow we managed to get a 1973 train - the same age as the Hitachis and still going strong. The trains seem to be in an M-T-M-T-T-M configuration, or at least that's how the cabs are arranged. We were in the fourth car, so we could see the driving controls in the adjacent cab. They looked basic and reliable like a W-class tram's, and Midga expressed a wish to have a go at driving one.

Heathrow hasn't changed since we were here two weeks ago. There's some sort of security scare on at the moment so they're being a bit more thorough with their bag checks, and we were told to arrive three hours before flying instead of two. That meant more time to kill after check-in of course, but we found power in a coffee shop and settled down to wait.

As we are now leaving the land of tube trains, let me just make sure I've covered everything.

As an Old World city, London has grown with not so much urban planning as urban opportunism. Even the spare of urban renewal courtesy of the Luftwaffe in 1940 didn't really make London focus itself on any particular key areas for development - or at least if it did that isn't really reflected in the layout of the transport network. That makes it hard to know what's what by any method apart from memorising vast numbers of origin/destination combinations and their attendant journey plans. An interesting side effect is that there's no rhyme or reason to platform numbers - where we can define Platform 1 as being the platform for up trains and Platform 2 for down trains (Burnley excepted), in the tube there isn't even a universal definition of up.

It's particularly bad on the Circle line. It's not a true circle - it comes back and meets itself, but not at the origin. From Paddington you can get Circle line trains in four different directions! How is this handled? Every train says "This is a Circle line train via x and y" - with x and y changing at intervals along the trip. Quite clunky really.

Most routes (including the Overground, DLR and British Rail services) use the "Fish and Chips" method of running services - a main line into a big city station with lots of terminating platforms. It's more flexible operationally than the "Apple Pie" method (services running through the city and out the other side, with only a few extra platforms) but uses more land and is less flexible strategically. So as tube patronage has grown and capacity at terminal stations has been filled, weird stopping patterns have arisen, with trains terminating one or two stops short of the end of the line. Also when new lines are built (or existing ones are connected up) they have to do the same thing.

Tunnelling, and especially making modifications to existing tunnels, is vastly expensive, especially in high value real estate. Anyone building tunnels needs to plan it carefully and tie it in with urban planning for the next few centuries, because changing it once it's in place is as close to impossible as macro evolution. Not looking at anyone in particular, Victorian Liberal party. And when I say plan, I mean every aspect - for example, a tunnel which enforces a non-standard loading gauge and platform height is a bad tunnel. (Incidentally, they really have done the very best they can with those tunnels - the trains fit like a 500-class in the Mount Lofty tunnel, which means the air in front of the train all gets pushed forward, not around - so the breeze in the face that tells you a train is approaching is of hurricane proportions.)

There were a few curiosities that don't really matter but stick in my mind. Escalator Manners exist in reverse - stand on the right, walk on the left. They don't drive on the wrong side of the road, I wonder how that state of affairs came up.

Tube trains are only just starting to get air conditioning now. Most trains just have a window in the end communication door for ventilation, not even hopper windows. And yet they manage to have trains packed to the gills (longitudinal seats will do that) without, presumably, people passing out regularly and needing an ambulance. Or maybe they do and that's why there's an ad campaign in the best "Eat More Fruit" style, telling people to keep cool with a bottle of water.

Due to the different loading gauges there are "mind the gap" announcements at most stations. But where the platforms are at the right height the gap is miniscule - about as good as our tram super stops. Suspension on the trains must have been tightened up or something, I've never seen that on a heavy rail network.

Well, bye bye tube. You've taught me a lot and I'm going to hold onto my Oyster card even though I could cash it in and get a few quid for it. Like Aslan would have said if he'd had wheels instead of paws, you form the backbone of Transport For London, which is both honour enough to raise the head of the poorest beggar and shame enough to bow the head of the most powerful king that ever lived.

A Narnia quote is always a good way to finish off a blog post.

The Angelico Anglo Adventure - Thomas and Bertie

Thomas, you understand, represents gunzelling. After all, most gunzels since the 1980s have grown up on Rev Awdry's books (or at least the TV derivatives) and they answer all the basic questions like what a set of points does. But Bertie, in this case, isn't a bus but a Wooster. More of him later. Yes, much more. Foine, foine, foine.

So today the humans got up and got going at a decent hour for a day's gunzelling - that is, earlier than they have for the rest of this holiday trip. After wasting a considerable amount of time focusing their attention on food and clothes, they headed off. In two different directions! Asha went for the Shakespeare Globe theatre and Kensington Gardens, but she had a very frustrating day because she couldn't get in to either of them and wasted a lot of time waiting for buses and trains, which I wouldn't have minded (as long as there was a station to study, or something) but when you have something else in mind even studying foreign railway infrastructure just doesn't satisfy. So let's skip over that and talk about the day Midga and I had.

We started by putting a few quiddages onto his Oyster card, we knew it was going to get a work-out today. Then it was off to Kings Cross St Pancras, which on the tube is one station with exits on both sides of the road (ie one to each station). Poor Gordon was so close when he went to London and said it was "all wrong". Anyone who's played Scotland Yard will remember stop 13 with tube connections to anywhere at all. Incidentally we're going to have to have another go at that game now.

St Pancras is, of course, St Pancras International. And it really feels like an international airport! The shops are all up-market (one which is still under construction advertises itself London's oldest bookshop, which is puzzling). International and long distance trains are upstairs, and the Overground and short distance are downstairs. A double decker station, why not?

We took a Class 319 EMU to Farringdon. It's very much like a Sprinter (the trains on the Buxton line) on the outside, but the inside is more for short distance trips. When we got off we noticed Farringdon has 25kV AC overhead and 750V DV third rail on same tracks. That's good to know, like the combination of light rail and O-bahn.

Back we went, and this time visited King's Cross - London terminus of the Flying Scotsman. Today it's a nice mix of old and new - classic brickwork walls and a modern sculpted roof with blue light projected onto it. A footbridge connects the main platforms and it also goes through the wall to the section where local trains run from.

Ask me how they keep pigeons out of the station! Sometimes natural methods are the best, they say. In this case it's the most effective I've seen. Wait for it - they have an official Network Rail raptor handler, who parades a real live hawk around the station to frighten them away. There were exactly 0 pigeons at King's Cross today, giving the bird of prey method a distinct edge over the Caulfield spikes and the Box Hill netting.

Eventually we made our way back to the tube to visit Euston. Actually from King's Cross St Pancras you can't get to Euston itself, you can get to Euston Square which is about 400m away. It's just the wrong distance, not far enough to take a train between them but not close enough to call it part of the same station.

Euston itself is very grubby by comparison with the other two, the platform section has low ceilings and poor lighting. The concourse is nice and open though. Interestingly it still has what looks like a motorail dock, but by the look of it I reckon it's only used for getting freight into station.

By then it was time to head off for Leicester Square, because we're seeing Jeeves and Wooster today! Should I break that out into a new post? Nah why bother, you get a mega post today!

I was a little apprehensive to be honest, because the charm of the books is Bertie's inimitable narrative style, and the contrast between the way the events really happen (which the readers work out for themselves) and the way Bertie sees them. The TV series misses this completely, by telling the story from an external point of view, not Bertie's. But this stage version was great. It existed as a sort of play within a dinner party narrative - it opened with Bertie telling us how Bingo Little had loved the story and suggested he do it on stage, and then saying "I've seen lots of theatre, acting seems pretty easy so here goes!"

The story line was the one about Totleigh Towers and the cow creamer - is that Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit? Or Right Ho Jeeves? I shall have to research this question, woe is me. All the roles in the inner play were played by three guys - in the outer dinner party they were Bertie, Jeeves and Seppings. That was good - it meant they didn't have to find an actress who could do justice to the role of Aunt Dahlia (red face, massive bulk, massive voice, genial nature, breezy manner and love of the use of blackmail to bend nephews to her will) or drag any supermodels away from Hollywood at enormous salaries to play Madeline Bassett. Plus, it meant the petite Stiffy Byng was taller than Bertie, and whenever Roderick Spode entered there was quite a business of Seppings climbing up onto a wheeled truck (Fessick and the holocaust cloak, anyone?) and operating a dummy colossus figure like a glove puppet.

The narrative was shortened somewhat, to get it into a two hour theatre slot. But that gave the authors an opportunity to exchange the policeman's-helmet-out-the-window gag with handing the bally thing to an audience member in the front row. We had bought cheap seats in the crick-neck area, which was a shame for Asha who could see about a third of the action, but great for Midga who got to handle one of the props of a professional London show. He had Asha's Tyrolean hat in his other hand, and had to be very careful to give the right one back when Jeeves came in with his magic wand at the end of the show.

Technically, the show was quite brilliant. The stage was fairly bare at the beginning, with Bertie in his easy chair and not much else. Then there was a noise of hammering off stage and Jeeves rolls in the wall of Bertie's drawing room and says "I thought it might lend colour to your narrative, sir" and Bertie says "I say, Jeeves, did you just whip that up now? That's amazing!" The actor playing Bertie had a grin just like Andy Payne, and I thought he suited the role perfectly.

Later in the show Jeeves brings out a bike with its back wheel propped up, and pedals it as the stage rotates! Bertie acts all confused of course, "I can't find the door Jeeves, where have you put it?"

Changing costumes is done cleverly each time. To play Madeline, Jeeves takes a moment to panic, then snatches a lamp shade off a lamp to be her hat and a curtain off a window for a skirt and speaks falsetto. When Stiffy springs her trap on Uncle Watkin and he summons her to tell her not to marry Bertie, Jeeves comes out in a half-and-half costume (Seppings is playing Sir Watkin's butler Butterfield at the time) and has a dialogue with himself.

I think it can probably be summed up as being a show full of the performers' inner Bugs Bunny - in other words, a great one. I think even non-Wodehouse fans would appreciate it.

After the show we wandered around Leicester Square for a bit (looking for food as usual) and then started heading for Aldgate - there's another dancing lesson on tonight. The way to Aldgate was via Euston, which Midga and I enjoyed but Asha formed the opinion that if she never saw another tube station in her life she wouldn't mind. The narrow twisting passages all alike and pressing crowds in peak time aren't the best environment to be in when you've already done 20km of walking that day and have a broken toe. But that mood passed when we got to the dancing class, because they were teaching something called a "Swing Out". Apparently that's something both my humans have been waiting for. To me it just looked like bodies bouncing around the stage and arms and legs jerking in random directions. No wonder Asha had her feet on Midga's lap (where I usually sit) on the tube on the way home.

Tomorrow we fly home.

The Angelico Anglo-Austrian Adventure - Twain on Europe

Mark Twain once described New South Wales Government Railways' practice of weighing baggage and charging for the excess as being "troublesome and European - that which is not troublesome cannot be truly described as European". And so it proves as we board the ferry for Dover - compared with our southbound crossing where we just went straight on, straight off and on our way, this time we had to queue up for ages, get off the bus, go through Passport Control, get back on the bus, and then queue up again to get onto the boat. Incidentally, it's the same one we had before, the Pride of Burgundy, owned by P&O Ferries.

It felt good to swap the universal plug adaptor from European to British mode. Luckily we were on board before all the tables in the bar became occupied, and one TWROAPP was still vacant. So Midga and I spent most of the voyage playing OpenTTD, which we haven't done for ages. No WiFi on the boat unfortunately.

The bus ride from the docks to London seemed to last a lot longer than it did. The crew were good, but not as hilarious as Spencer and Neil. Driving up the motorway we paralleled a railway - Midga and I were hoping it was the main line to the Channel Tunnel and that we might see a Eurostar flash by at some unbelievable rate of knots. Unfortunately we saw nothing at all - not even a local EMU. Ah well.

When we got to London Victoria the driver announced the directions for people transferring to the National Express service to Glasgow. Now over here, National Express is a bus company, not the owner of M>Train, M>Tram and V/Line. Who travels to Glasgow by bus when there's two completely awesome rail options? Well I guess it's the same answer as who goes to Austria by bus instead of flying or Chunnelling - people who holiday on a budget.

From Victoria we got the tube to Shelly's and arrived just as the humans were approaching 0% battery power. So no gunzelling tonight. It was dark out anyway.

The next day it was time to start our London adventures. We sat around gasbagging with Shelly for a while, then headed out. Just shopping today, and getting an idea about navigating London.

The number of options for buses and tube stations is mind boggling. Without a grid network of main roads there's bus routes within walking distance in several different directions, and with the tube the way it is you can pick which one to walk to based on where you're going. I wonder how long it takes to get used to it.

So we went to Oxford Street, to a discount clothes shop called Primark. Apparently it's even cheaper than KMart and Target, and Asha needs some clothes of some sort. What with the crowds, the queues and the decidedly non-linear (and completely nonsensical) method they use to allocate numbers to sizes, we spend most of the day there.

That evening is spent recounting our Austrian adventures to Shelly, and talking randomly about anything that comes up. Fun people are fun.

The next day it was time to tourist around. We started by going to Paddington station to buy our London Passes. It's a kind of "welcome to the city" card, where you pay 47 pounds and get up to 90 pounds worth of museum entries for the day. Paddington itself was quite a sight - five HST sets all lined up, and the usual massive concourse lined with eateries. It's just like being at Manchester Piccadilly again but with different trains!

And that was just the beginning, we were off to the Tower of London. Which is quite old, even in human years. We took a guided tour with one of the Yeomen Warders, who told us bloodthirsty stories about beheadings and political intrigue which would completely destroy your respect for the monarchy if you didn't bear in mind there weren't any parliamentarians back then so each member of the royal family had to possess disrespectability enough for six, just to make up the allotted quantity.

We had to hurry (sic) a bit because we wanted to see about a dozen different places today, and the next one on the list was Tower Bridge, which is right next door. Victorian era engineering, my all-time favourite! Unfortunately the "Tower Bridge experience" is aimed at tourists who really don't care how steam power or hydraulics work and just want to take a few happy snaps and then leave. Worse still, when people who ARE interested see an exhibition like that, all they can do is take a few happy snaps and then leave - with a few wistful backward glances at the stunningly restored brasswork and cylinder castings. Still, the rivetted ironwork holding up the towers of the bridge was quite a sight. And there was a video reenactment of Queen Victoria discussing the urban planning, world heritage and skyline implications of having a second river crossing. That was fun.

Now I'm not really qualified to comment on the afternoon, because without legs and feet of my own I have no idea just how tiring it can be to tramp around London, going from map to map and wondering why it takes so long to get anywhere. But at least we got a chance to buy tickets to Jeeves and Wooster for tomorrow, which we're seeing with Trevor F.

To my (limited) understanding, walking and dancing are pretty much the same thing, so if a pair of humans don't feel like walking, a whole evening of dancing will be right out. But no. Not only did they brave the rain to go to a blues dancing lesson, but they paid good money for it too. I'm beginning to see how Midga could behave the way he did at the Tyrolean night - after all, he likes learning stuff, and keeping in time to the music is pretty much the same skill as stepping from one pallet of chairs to the next without falling over. Not that he ever did that, of course. Not while he was secretary of the Say Stafe Steam, or Stay Safe Team, or whatever they called it. No, certainly not.

After about an hour of shamelessly bumping his rear at everyone else in the room the lesson was over. My attention span was pretty much done, but Asha said there was another whole lesson to go, AND something called "social" after that. It was too much for me so Midga and I went for a bit of a stroll. No particular reason, we'd just seen trains in the distance and were curious.

And I'm so glad we did! It was the Docklands Light Railway, which runs driverless trains! The station we were at was one stop from the city terminus - or rather, the city termini, because there are two of them. Since we had an Oyster card already on the go we decided to take a ride. From Shadwell to Bank we just sort of watched through the window, observing the strange shape of the third rail and the electrical conduit running down the centre of the Four Foot connecting to each rail alternately - presumably providing a return circuit in case ground isn't the same as ground when there's 25kV AC trains running in the same reservation as 750V DC light rail vehicles.

From Bank to Shadwell we got the front seat. There are notices up saying that we have to vacate the seat if asked to by the Customer Service Agent if they want to drive the train from the front. At one point she was doing exactly that - she pressed a button to say "Close the doors" and then another to say "Go", and the train did everything else. It knew when the flat junction between the Bank and Tower Gateway lines was occupied. It even knew there was a train slowing into Shadwell station in front of us - and from the way it slowed down in increments I think it must have moving block safeworking. That would explain why I didn't see any signals - do you call it in-cab signalling when there's no cab?

Incidentally, re the flat junction, Bank is an underground station, and immediately after the junction the line descends off a viaduct to ground level (and then into a tunnel portal). Why on earth couldn't they put the descending lines in between the flat ones and avoid the junction? Anyway, it was fun to see the train's automatic "driver" stopping at a "red signal" on a steep gradient, and then starting again when it went "green".

Back at Shadwell with time to kill we visited Tower Gateway, which has platforms on both sides of the single terminating track - which provides a unique example of a station which has a single platform and a double platform by the same operation.

Watching the track from the front of a train never gets old. We need more half-width cabs, or double decker vehicles, or (let's go for broke) driverless trains in Melbourne!

Back at Shadwell we glanced around the Overground station (which was in fact underground) but the trains were the same Class 378 things we saw a few years back. It was almost time for social so we went back to the dance studio.

Now social, I've worked out, is just a piece of time when there's no lesson going on. The people who took the lesson are still around, the music is still on, and anyone who wants to dance can just get up and dance. Midga and Asha had a go but they were a bit tired and headed home pretty soon. The teachers and several of the students expressed deep appreciation for them visiting from the other side of the world, and homeward they trod.

In London there are quite a few bus routes that keep running at a useful frequency until midnight. It's amazing. So we didn't take the Overground back to the tube station to go home, we just sat in a bus shelter trying to keep the rain off for a few minutes, and then a bus came along.

Double decker buses are fun. Up the top you can see forward, but you're so high that perspective tells you everything's closer than it seems. So a cyclist who's calmly minding their own business in the left gutter looks like they're inches from disaster when actually the bus is overtaking them in a perfect "be nice to cyclists week" manner.

From the tube to Shelly's Midga offered Asha a piggy back, but he's getting out of shape and couldn't do it. Pity, it would have made quite a photo.

The Angelico Austrian Adventure - so long, farewell, auf widersehen, goodbye

We headed downstairs for breakfast for the last time. I've noticed breakfast music is quite different over here. In Australia we usually hear slow jazz with a lot of brass and no beat, which makes people drag their eyelids open and linger over their coffee. Everywhere we've been so far in Europe has played march music with a distinct rhythm to it, which makes people chew their food and then get up and do stuff.

On that (musical) note, a word about in-store and background music in general. As you know, in-store music sits close to Midga's heart, as it represents his biggest victory over the bureaucracy. He started a thread on the Officeworks discussion forum saying how much the Christmas music sucks and offering to record some which people would flock to the store to listen to. All the other stores jumped in and agreed, someone from head office saw it, and that year there was no dreary Christmas music in stores.

Anyway, in-store music over here, mysteriously, tends to be stuff we know - American pop songs from all eras, sung in English. I get the point that most people over here speak English so it's not a problem, but they have plenty of great music of their own, why do they have to get fobbed off with second-rate American junk like James Hacker was?

After breakfast we had some time to kill before we were due to be joined by Midga's Swiss relos - they aren't actually Swiss but they live there. So we took the bummelbahn to the next village along and took the cable car up the mountain - just for fun, and for the photo op too.

Cable car tech is cool. They manage the difference in speed between cruise and boarding by having the cars drop off the cable and into a rack which moves at a crawling speed. The rack also has a trip mechanism which unlocks the doors (and locks them again just before transitioning the car onto the cable). It's a fairly flexible system, cars can be added or taken off as required (we saw spare cars stabled at the winding station). The traction comes from a 25kV plant in the winding house, and the place is full of hefty cables delivering RICH CHUNKY VOLTS to some fairly solid looking steelwork. The stanchions are passive, they have enough roller wheels to allow the cable to change angle if necessary, but don't add any power. The grip mechanism on the cars has to fit into the groove on the wheels, obviously.

The most distinctive feature of the cable car as a mode of transport is that it's not really DDA compliant. Since the car keeps moving (at a crawl) anyone who's really unsteady on their pins will have trouble getting in and out. Ditto wheelchairs. Depending on the exact method of taking cars on and off, I can conceive a system where people get onto a stabled car, which is then swapped for a car that was running. That should fix the DDA issues, leaving the cable car as a very useful option to have in a transport planner's arsenal. It provides a 20 second service frequency, is fairly straightforward to scale up (by adding cars until the winding house draws more power than the grid can provide, or the science of metallurgy can't provide steel cables that will take the weight), and operates at quite a reasonable speed. It's also got a very small land footprint while being independent of road traffic. Unfortunately I suspect capital and maintenance costs might be a bit higher than for some other vehicle types, but staffing costs are minimal.

The views from the car on the trip up the mountain were amazing. Since the car travels in a (nearly) straight line from staunchion to staunchion, the height above ground level varied considerably. Sometimes we were close enough to see every flower, other times we were above the tops of the trees. Some of the staunchions were pretty tall too, and what was funny to Australian eyes was that the maintenance access ladders weren't guarded with razor wire, and didn't have cages around them. Mountain people are just sensible, I guess.

We got out of the cable car about 20 seconds after the last bummelbahn which would get us to our hotel in time to meet the relos. So we checked out the regular bus timetable, which is also an hourly service. It would get us there just in time, and we had 40 minutes to wait. So we decided to visit the wood museum.

It would have been fascinating for someone who could understand German - as well as the wood carving full scale models of all sorts of things, there were videos showing every stage of the process (including growing the wood). Somewhat cheekily they charged us an extra euro on our admission fee for the privilege of taking photos.

Unpainted timber features heavily as a building material in the mountains. After all, there are plenty of trees there, and they're tall and as straight as a laser beam. The timber look, combined with the planter boxes full of flowers, makes the houses look beautiful despite being practically identical. It's time timber made a comeback as a building material, and oil made a comeback as a method of treatment instead of paint.

We got to the bus stop in good time, and the bus turned up at the exact minute the timetable promised. Nice. EUR2.80 took us to the hotel (it's a zone system, according to the metadata on the ticket), on a nicely padded seat in a very quiet bus. It was a high floor with two doors, and had luggage racks. The "Next stop" buttons were in English!

The relos were there when we arrived, and the humans started nattering away nineteen to the dozen. After a huge lunch (after which a doggie bag was required) they took another cable car up to the top of the hill in the village. Uncle Willem looks at the way mechanical things work, same as Midga and I do, so he was able to tell us a few things we hadn't been able to glean from a good long look at the works. It was great to have someone to geek out with.

From the top of the hill we had a complete view all the way round (just like the idiot whose wife used Lumps) and spent quite a bit of time just strolling around taking in the views. The paragliders were taking off from a cafe near the top station of the cable car run, so Midga and Uncle Willem watched them take off and examined the aerodynamics of every stage of the flight. Luckily for the girls it started to rain or we might have been up there all day. We took shelter in the cable car, and by the time we got back down the rain had given up. We kept chatting until it was time for them to head home (they had a four hour drive ahead of them) - or rather, until they'd said it was time, continued the conversation, said it was really time, stood up, had another conversation as an afterthought, said goodbye, given messages to all the family for relaying when we get home, explained their plans for their next visit to Australia, and said goodbye again. Ah, family.

Then it was just a waiting game. We watched our host receive another bus load of guests, not nearly as well behaved as us - petty, demanding and not all that polite. Maybe that's why when we all got on board our bus he came aboard to thank us and wish us a pleasant journey. Thank you, Harfenwirt.

From there it was a marathon of driving, Spencer's humour (until he decided it was late enough to turn off the lights and let the human passengers sleep), breaks every two or three hours, and reading Verity Stob. Midga didn't sleep much, which meant my battery got a workout. Luckily we've found power here at Calais where we're waiting for our connecting bus to London.

The next post will probably involve some tube trains. How exciting!

The Angelico Austrian Adventure - in which Midga climbs a tree and scrapes his hands

After winning the quiz night and getting a good night's rest, we were all up and about at 7:30 - apparently it's a long drive to Salzburg and so we had an earlier start.

In the bus we had a bit of role reversal - Spencer was driving and Neil was playing hostess. Heading down the mountain is getting less scary now - tacking around corners and holding up the traffic in both directions seems almost normal. Heading out on a different road to any we've taken so far we saw a servo selling AdBlue for about EUR0.75 - I guess that's to be expected with a lot of Euro 5 engines around but I'd never thought about it. How do we handle it in Australia? Are the only Euro 5 engines in operation owned by big transport companies that have their own fuel points? Or is the AdBlue topped up with the 50,000km service? Interesting.

On that note, there are a lot of old looking trucks around. The styling suggests something from the 60s or 70s, and the makes are names I've never heard of. It's quite a mix, most of the vehicles on the road are ultra-modern, the same sort we see at home in the colours of forward-thinking transport companies (if that's not a contradiction in terms now that FCL is gone). But there's nothing in between - I haven't seen a single Scania 3-series, Volvo F model, or any of the square bodied Mercedes that were common in the 80s and 90s. For rigid vehicles, the Mercedes Unimog seems to be the chassis of choice, which strikes a chord for me.

On the way to Salzburg we're actually crossing the border into Germany, through the section of Bavaria where Hitler settled after being released from jail. Spencer told us the whole story, without referring to any notes, while he was driving down a winding mountain road. Amazing.

As we got in to Salzburg the first thing I noticed were overhead wires. But there were no rails and on second glance I noticed there were two on each side. Salzburg has trolleybuses! That merited some photos. They're articulated, and have trolley poles that are quite long so the bus can be in either lane and still pick up a wire without difficulty. Interestingly the wires are staggered from side to side like ours - we do it to even out the wear on a pantograph, but you can't have a pantograph when you have two wires. Mysterious!

The Europe-wide agency that organizes local tour guides for tourist buses had somehow managed to get the time wrong. Apparently they're good at that, and also at forgetting to roster anyone on at all. But when she turned up she was in traditional dress and told us her middle name was Maria.

First stop was the Salzburg zoo, where the scene with the children climbing trees was shot. Midga went up one to get his photo taken, not too high as the group had moved on. The gazebo (without an arrow sticking out of it) where Rolf and Liesl had their after-telegram date was in the same area - it was built for the movie and the producers presented it to the town once the movie was finished. We weren't allowed in but we got a photo showing the gap in the benches where Rolf knelt down and Liesl did her best to give him a nasty flesh wound with a high heel.

Then we headed for the old part of Salzburg and looked around the various ancient buildings. On the way there we were directed to look out the right side of the bus, and through the trees (throoooooough the treeeeeeeeees) we caught the merest glimpse of the house which was the model of Captain Von Trapp's mansion. The rest of the tour was about the history of Salzburg and the birthplace of Mozart, which was interesting in its way but not really what we came for. But we did walk through a cemetery and see a genuine edelweiss in bloom.

In between eating lunch, Asha went into a few clothes shops and looked for a reasonably priced (ie anything under EUR200, which is about AUD something incredible) traditional dirndl. Not a hope. Apparently there's factory outlets around, but inner city clothes shops are priced between the tropopause and low earth orbit.

We rejoined our bus and went to a town called Mondsee, which has a beautiful cathedral which is where the wedding scene was filmed. None of it was in the least bit recognizable - we'll have to watch the movie with the photos handy and try to compare. Still, the artwork was quite a sight.

We had nearly an hour to kill before our bus left, so we went to a few more clothes shops and Asha actually tried on a dirndl that was priced well within the troposphere. There was nothing that really fit her without alterations, but from the front she looked lovely. I think Midga thought so too, and when he was invited to take a photo (that's the beauty of big cameras, they can't be easily hidden) he was over the moon. A cheaper-looking shop had the kind of prices we like but not the right size. And of course ordering anything in wouldn't work.

So we sat by the lake and watched the ducks swimming around. And picked up WiFi briefly.

Back through Salzburg we saw a trolleybus which had lost its poles - it still happens, and the driver still has to get out, pull them down and put them back on. I suspect once we get back there'll be a big rethink of the Smart Passengers policy on urban transport where there's no rails.

On the way home they had a DVD of the original Sound of Music movie playing on the bus's info system. Midga took off his headphones after a while (altitude, ears, bad combination) and could still say most of the lines in time to the lip-reading. Sad.

Tonight we're going to hear the owner of our hotel play the harp for us all. Apparently he does all sorts of styles. This should be quite an evening.