The old girl retires

S302 leads the 1240 Melbourne to Warnambool train through Footscray in Melbourne's inner west on 6 October 2005.

On January 9 2006 S302 made possibly her last journey as a front line locomotive in the V/Line fleet. In late 2004 the locomotive was brought out of storage and received much love and attention from EDI at Newport for a new lease on life. Returned to traffic in early 2005, she spent the best part of a year plying the rails on the daily 535 km round journey between Melbourne to Warnambool. Her return to service was not without trouble, having a reputation for unreliability and being speed restricted to 100 kmh as opposed to the usual 115 kmh for passenger trains on this route. Her future is uncertain.

Built in 1957 at Clyde Engineering in Sydney, she spent 37 years in service with the Victorian Railways (later known as Vicrail for a short period in the early 80's then V/Line) before being sold of in 1994. She was bought by the fledgling West Coast Railway along with other aging B, S and T class locomotives and other items of aging rolling stock. West Coast Railway was the private company that won the contract to provide the now privatised rail service between Melbourne and Warnambool.

This venture was somewhat of a success and acheived growth in passenger numbers. In the mid 2000s however things started to go wrong, first with the death of the company founder and CEO, followed by structural problems with the company's fleet of veteran diesel locomotives. This lead to the suspension of the rail service mid way through 2004. In late 2004 the company was wound up and rail services were again provided by the state owned V/Line, who purchased a number of items of rollingstock as well as locomotive S302 in order to be able to run the service.

Relevant links:

• Locopage S class page.
  
• V/Line webpage.
  
• Vicsig page on S302.
  
• Wongms blog entry on s302's last day in service.
  
• Martin Bennet's fotopic page documenting the last day.

I'm Ba-ack...

Yes, 'tis I!

Had a busy lead up to Christmas which is why the blogging stopped. Post Christmas it was the combination of couldn't be bothered with a side serve of being too busy.

Christmas itself was good, I didn't get many presents, but that's not what it's about. New years eve was OK too (not the greatest either).

Hopefully I'll be ably to think of more stuff to blog when I'm not quite so tired.

P.S there's no Chocolate crackles left either.

Chocolatey and crackely goodies!

Today I made Chocolate Crackles. They are yum.

Steam at Greensborough

Steamrail's K153 leads a train of BW cars through the 'S' curves at Greensborough on a shuttle trip to Macleod on Sunday 4th December 2005. Unseen in the photo is K190 on the rear of the train which will lead the return trip to Greensborough from Macleod. The occasion was for the Manna Gum Festival (it's an Arts Festival) at Greensborugh.

USB applications

For years I used floppy disks to transfer my work between school, then TAFE, then Uni and home. During that time the files just kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I got to the stage where I had to burn and waste CD's or FTP my work around instead. FTP was better than floppy disks, the latter having a tendency to fail at the most inapropriate moment, but having dial up at home made ftp a slow process for larger files.

It wasn't until last year after a bad experience with a rather large Powerpoint presentation that I bit the bullet and got myself a USB flash drive. After a bit of shopping around the various computer stores near uni I got myself a 128 mb Shintaro branded flash drive for about $45, which at the time was a good deal. Since then I have never looked back except for the fact I fill it up with so much crap that 128mb never seems like enough. I don't how I could do without it.

Lately I've been loading applications onto it. So far I've got:

• Irfanview
  
• OperaUSB
  
• Quickmailer
  
• npop
  
• Frontpage express
  
• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzles

The best type of applications to use on usb drives are those that are self contained in their own directory, which do not rely on recources stored in other locations such as the Documents and Settings folder, and/or those that install their own registry keys. A wide variety of applications suitable for USB flash drives is available, including simple text editors, image editors (Irfanview), email (npop and quickmailer), office suites (open office), browsers (Opera USB) and even various linux distrubutions that can boot straight off the usb drive or an acompanying CD.

Some sites that I have found with informaiton on USB flashdrives and compatible applictions include:

• USB flashdrive - Wikipedia
  
• The Portable Freeware Collection
  
• Kazias.net |USB Applications
  
• Standalone Applications
  
• TinyApps.org

Corporate Symbolism...

Recently I have become aware that Vision Australia has a new symbol. I can't remember what their old symbol looked like but the new one is wierd, just a couple of coloured dots. Last week after seeing it on TV it occuded to me that it might be braile for something. Then yesterday a lightning bolt hit me as I was walking past the Vision Australia office in Mount Street Heidelberg. The symbol is actually a "V" and an "A" in braile. Don't know why I didn't realise earlier...


So I checked it out on their website and sure enough there is a page that explains the new logo and how it conveys the image that they want to project to the public, as well as being clearly visible to people with poor eyesight. In addition to that, Vison Australia have created an audio logo. Being an organisation that are involved with people who are vison impaired an audio logo is a great idea. Basically it's a recording of someone saying their name and tagline with a short chime at the begining.

I just found it intriguing.

Steam at Hurstbridge

Steam locomotive J515 is approaching the home signal at Hurstbridge. The occasion was the inaugural Wattle Festival on Sunday the 4th of September 2004, the train was chartered from the Seymour Rail Heritage Centre. J515 is on this end while diesel loco T357 was on the rear. This arrangement was used to avoid the need for the steam loco to run around the train at Hurstbridge, which is impossible given that it is a dead end terminus. The train ran a number of trips between Hurstbridge and Diamond Creek throughout the day.

The Wattle Festival was held again in 2005, but this time the train was chartered from Steamrail instead.

To the end of the earth and back again!

Well not quite but it may as well have been...

What really happened was that I wanted to go to Photo Colour in Heidelberg to drop a film off to get developed and put on CD. So I decided to get the train to Heidelberg. On the way back I decided that I would get the most out my 2 hour (actually was more like 2 and a half hours) zone 2 Metcard by taking a ride to the end of the line as I still had over an hour left. My metcard expired at 6pm. From Heidelberg I got on the next train to arrive, which just happened to be a Macleod train. This was no problem though as I only had to wait a few minutes at Macleod for the following Hurstbridge train.

The trip to Hurstbridge was fairly eneventful except for a problem with a couple of level crossings just on the down side of Eltham. To me it seemed like a problem with the track circuits that trigger the bells and gates, most likely related to the rain we'd been having for most of the day. So I arrived a Hurstbridge with half an hour left on my ticket. As I didn't consult a timetable I had no idea when the next train back was, but as long as it left before 6pm I'd still be able to use it for the return journey. I was hoping that the train I came on would go back to the city but as I suspected the Comeng continued on and joined a lonely X'Trapolis in the sidings beyond the platform.

A quick look at the timetable revealed that the next train departed at 5:56, cutting it fine, but all was OK. So I walked up and down the platform a couple of times, checked out the sidings adjacent the platform, checked to see what the lever on the platform did and various other gunzel type things. The train was scheduled to arrive at 5:51 but it didn't get in until at least the departure time. As a result it departed a couple of minutes late. For the record it was a Comeng and the leading car (where I was seated) was real groaner.

On the way back one surprise was a staff exchange at Diamond Creek, which occured even though we weren't scheduled to cross another train there. Checking the timetable that I picked up at Hurstbridge an explanation of Diamond Creek being open as a staff station was found in that, the train I'd gone to Hurstbridge on would form the next up train departing at 6:10pm, and that it would cross the next down at Diamond Creek. We would cross that same down train at Eltham. Even though the train departed Hurstbridge late we still arrived at Eltham on time and so had to wait the full five minutes for our cross there. From there on it was smooth sailing back towards my home station.

Boring I know but it's all I can think of to blog at the moment...

What is the world coming to?

I caught four trains on Friday. One from Greensborough to the City, one from the City to Box Hill, then tat return trip, and finally one back to Greensborough. What ties all of these together? All four trains I caught on Friday were X'Trapolis or "crappers" as some people call them. On all my journeys I saw plenty of other trains, all were a mixture of Comengs and X'Trapolis, with the only Hitachi in sight looking all forlorn in the yard at Camberwell by itself. What is the world coming to?

In other news

Ever since playing with a 12" iBook in Myer a few weeks ago I've wanted one. One drawback of the 12" versus the 14" is the lack of a DVD burner, but it would be easy enough to use either the wireless networking or external hard drive for backups/transfers of large ammounts of data.

Although I reckon I could get along just nicely with one of the original colourful retro iBooks. Second hand of course, which is the more likely scenario for me.


The fact is that I would just like a laptop, and the iBooks just look so damn cool.

It has come to pass that...

You Are an Emo Rocker!

Expressive and deep, lyrics are really your thing. That doesn't mean you don't rock out... You just rock out with meaning. For you, rock is more about connecting than grandstanding.

What Kind of Rocker Are You?

While not altogether bad, it's not what I expected. Although a lot of the time I think I feel "emo". Man I wish I was 10 years younger, I'd be all like the uber emo. Maybe I should just grow up...

Back to school

Every Tuesday my mum picks my niece up from school. So today with nothing to do I thought I'd tag along. It's really wierd going back to a primary school after so many years (at least 12), everything is so small. The chairs are small, the tables are small, the students are small... These things weren't that small when I went to school were they?

What really shocked me was how low the drinking taps were to the ground. I was thirsty so while waiting for the bell I decided to take a drink from one of these oh so low taps. So there I was stooping over the tap when I depressed the lever, only to get squirted in the face with a jet of cold water. I'd forgotten how tempremental these taps are. Whether they are tempremental through through student or divine tamperings I don't know. After the bell rang I noticed a couple of kids come and take a drink and none of the used the middle tap (the one I used). It's almost as if they have a sixth "tap" sense. Wierd...

Static

Once again this blog has been neglected for a reasonable ammount of time. The reasons for this absence include:

1. Having nothing worth bloging.


2. The loss of my digital camera.


3. Thinking up blog entires and then forgetting them again.

So there you have it.

Orchids

This is one of my mum's orchids that has recently being flowering.

Silence

It's been a bit quiet around here lately hasn't it? This is mostly because I just havn't had anything worth saying. I think I'm better now...

By George, is that the time?

Hard to beleive I know, but today marks the first aniversary of Ben's Adventures: The Blog. Yep, one year already. In that year this blog has mostly been laying idle so my new years resolution is to post more often than I have in the last year. It may not make sense but by George (gotta stop using that) I'm going to post stuff. I like the idea of posting a photo or a series of photos so expect some more of that sort of thing.

The scenery channel...

broadcasting beautiful views 24 hours a day.

This is my desktop wallpaper. I took this photo in October 2004 looking west along the Yarra River from Birrarung Mar. Sometimes when I sit down at the computer I feel the need to put on sunglasses.

Tunnelvision Redux

This is a tunnel on the Sydney Light Rail looking towards Harbourside Convention station from Pyrmont Bay station.

The original Tunnelvision was taken here in Melbourne at the end of platform 1 at Parliament Station looking towards Jolimont/Flinders Street.

Alone in the dark.

Yes that's right, tonight I went to see a movie by myself. People seem to have an irrational fear of going to see a film solo. Don't get me wrong, sharing the experience with others is great, but it's actually not all that much different when you go by yourself. I mean you come into the theatre, sit down, watch some trailers and ads, eat whatever you brought with you (as if you'd pay that much for food, unless it's a really good choctop)watch the movie and then leave. The downside is that you don't immediately get to praise or put down the film, but you can do that latter. The upside is that you get to go and see whatever you damn well want.

In case you were wondering I went to see Wallace and Grommit: Curse of the Were Rabbit at the brand new Melbourne Central Hoyts cinemas. The film itself was > a laugh a minute (in case you didn't get it the ">" is a greater than sign), I recommend that everyone who hasn't already seen it to do so. Just great harmless fun.

The cinema itself was fantastic, the seats were comfy and had extra wide arm rests. As I overheard someone else say, you can still smell that new cinema smell.

I suppose I should give the film a star rating, so I'll give it ****(four stars).

shit weekend

Well here it is 12:30 on Sunday night (actually Monday morning) and I haven't been any further than the letter box since coming home on Friday night. Don't ask me what I did all weekend because it was all rather boring.

Friday was OK though as I went to the Dutch Masters exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. This is a collection of dutch paintings from the 15th and 16th century most of which were on loan from the Rieksmuseum (not too sure how it's spelt actually) in Amsterdam. Most notably the exhibition featured a number of paintings by Rembrandt. One thing that I got from the exhibition was how progressive the Dutch were during this time (arguably they still are in certain ways). Unfortunately it finished today, so now you'll have to fly to Amstredam to see most of the paintings.

We had lunch/afternoon tea in the cafe there and we were sitting at the table next to one of the actors off Blue Healers, not John Wood (I've seen him at the football), but one of the younger constables on the show. He has a really irritating voice, which is what made me look.

After leaving the gallery we had dinner in the food court at Southgate. I had BBQ chicken thighs from Nando's, which were nice, but had to have the mild peri peri as the hot had ran out. I just can't help but think that $11 is just a bit much for 4 skimpy bits of chicken, about $2 worth of chips and and small bottle of coke.