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I went to catch a train yes­ter­day. Actu­ally, a few trains: one to get me from Auchen­flower to the city, and another to get me from the city to the Gold Coast. I left my apart­ment at 12, so should have been on the Coast no later than 2:15, and that’s assum­ing i just missed the train both times and had to wait a half hour for each.

I walked the 100m from my apart­ment to the sta­tion, and promptly ran into my first prob­lem for the day. The sta­tion had 3 active ticket vend­ing machines — but all of them only accept coins. The ticket I needed to get was a zone 1 – 15 off-peak daily, which costs $15.90.

I had plenty of cash on me — but in coins, only $2, which wasn’t enough to get even the cheap­est ticket from the machine. There was a change machine pro­vided — but it was out of order. In the end, I decided to take my chances and just take a train into the city and get a ticket there — they do have ticket win­dows inside the ticket bar­ri­ers, after all.

After this dilemma was resolved, I then had to wait almost an hour for the first train to go through Auchen­flower toward the city. I don’t know what hap­pened to the first train that was meant to come through: pre­sum­ably it was can­celled for some rea­son, but I have no way of know­ing as there was no announce­ment made.

When this train finally came, I couldn’t get on. There wasn’t any space. I’ve seen plenty of crowded trains — I push my way onto an already crowded train every morn­ing at town hall sta­tion — and there’s always room for just one more per­son, espe­cially if peo­ple are will­ing to spread out into the aisles. Not this time though — every car­riage already had the aisle com­pletely full of peo­ple; the vestibule areas where so full of peo­ple that they were bulging out the door­way, and only every­body col­lec­tively breath­ing in and squish­ing together allowed the doors to close.

For­tu­nately, a spe­cial ser­vice had been pro­vided just 10 min­utes later to cater for the crowds — there was a Bron­cos game on and every­one was head­ing to Sun­corp Sta­dium, one stop away from me in the direc­tion of the city. When this train came, I was able to squeeze on board, but only just barely. Unfor­tu­nately, there were 3 – 4 fam­i­lies or groups of peo­ple on the plat­form, and although I could squeeze myself in, there was no way a group of even 4 peo­ple could have found space — so they were again left behind, to wait for the next train in another 20 – 25 minutes.

So, I was on the train, and about 3 min­utes later, every­one else was get­ting off at the next sta­tion. I noticed one very sen­si­ble thing here: there were no ticket bar­ri­ers at this sta­tion. Given that the sta­tion is right beside the sta­dium and reg­u­larly has to deal with large crowds like this, I can only imag­ine that CityRail would have erected a mon­stros­ity on the order of Olympic Park sta­tion. I know for sure they’d have put up an amount of ticket bar­ri­ers about 50% less than what was required to allow every­one a swift egress from the sta­tion; and they’d for sure have swarms of greyshirts around ready to fine any­one who even looked side­ways at them. In other words, it’d be a great chance for them to really make some rev­enue for a change.

In Bris­bane though: no ticket bar­ri­ers. Two secu­rity guards, whose sole func­tion was to ask peo­ple to step behind the yel­low line for their own safety. No-one check­ing tick­ets at all. The plat­form just has two wide open gates, one onto a foot­path and one onto a spe­cial walk­way that goes direct to the sta­dium. It’s amaz­ing how quickly an entire train­ful of peo­ple can dis­perse when arti­fi­cial imped­i­ments are taken away.

Unfor­tu­nately, this was to be the only sane thing I saw City­Train do all day.

Admittedly,not ahv­ing ticket bar­ri­ers or ticket machines at Mil­ton doesn’t really make much dif­fer­ence. Brisbane’s tick­ets are flimsy lit­tle bits of paper, printed on a ther­mal printer. Even at the sta­tions where there are ticket inspec­tors (there are no ticket bar­ri­ers in use any­where, as there are no tick­ets that can be read by a bar­rier), they’re only their for show — when they have a whole train­load of peo­ple walk­ing past them, as they often do at the city sta­tions, they barely have time to check that each per­son is wav­ing a piece of paper of approx­i­mately the right shape/size/colour at them — there’s no way in the world they can pos­si­bly ver­ify what’s writ­ten on the bits of paper.

By the time I got to Roma Street, it was a lit­tle after 1:30 — already 90 min­utes since I’d left my apart­ment. I was starv­ing by this point, so went upstairs to the food­court (buy­ing a ticket from the inter­nal ticket win­dow on my way out) and had some­thign to eat. I came back down, checked the indi­ca­tor boards and found that my train was leav­ing in about 10 min­utes on plat­form 5. I headed over to plat­form 5 and sat on a bench to await my train.

I’d been there about 7 min­utes when a train pulled into plat­form 6, across the other side of the tracks from me. As it was pulling in, an announce­ment came over the PA: Pas­sen­gers await­ing the some­thing ser­vice on plat­form 5, your train has now arrived on plat­form 6. This nat­u­rally pro­duced a bit of a scram­ble, with the 5 or so peo­ple who’d been wait­ing for the train leap­ing up, sprint­ing down the stairs, and across to the train.

I’d seen this behav­iour of not telling cus­tomers about plat­form changes until the train arrived the pre­vi­ous night as well, and it struck me as strange then. It’s feels like the trains creep up on the sta­tion and play lit­tle jokes by appear­ing at the wrong spot. “Oooh, look at that pas­sen­gers.. That naught Cleve­land train that’s meant to be on plat­form 5 has been a bit cheeky! Yes, he switched tracks while we had our backs turned, and now he’s over on plat­form 6! How naughty of him. You’d all best run over there right now, or he’ll be gone and you’ll have to wait half an hour for the next one. Last one in is a rot­ten eg!”

This was the point at which I decided I need to write a rant about the ser­vice City­Train was(n’t) pro­vid­ing, so I pulled out my phone and started mak­ing notes. This was almost my down­fall, for while I was busily scrib­bling away, my train pulled up behind me on plat­form 4. This time, there was no announce­ment at all — I only realised it was my train because of the shrieks of the other pas­sen­gers on my plat­form as they jumped up and raced over to plat­form 4.

For­tu­nately, that was almost the end of the insan­ity from City­Train for the day. Other things I did notice, though:

* A boy of about 16 jumped into our train just as the doors were clos­ing. The train got about 3m past the sta­tion, then stopped so that the drive could come out of his cabin and give a very stern lec­ture to the boy and hold every­one else up for a few minutes

* Unlike Syd­ney, where the base unit is a 4-car set, which is usu­ally com­bined with another set to make a total of 8 cars, the base unit here is a 3-car set, usu­ally com­bined to make a 6-car set. At night though, most trains are only 3-cars. How do they acheive this? Sim­ply by turn­ing off the rear 3 cars. They’re still there; City­Train is still expend­ing vast amounts of elec­tric­ity to drag them around the net­work, but they’re switched off and inac­ces­si­ble to pas­sen­gers. This might make sense if there was lit­tle clien­tel, but I saw trains that had their three cars full of peo­ple stand­ing in aisles — given that the other three cars are there any­way, and are incur­ring a cost to be dragged around, it seems sense­less to arbi­trar­ily exclude pas­sen­gers from those carriages.

I ended up arriv­ing on the coast about 3:30, by which time their was a lovely stiff chill sea breeze whip­ping up sand and mak­ing the beach unin­hab­it­able. Thanks, CityTrain!