“Take it easy - take the TRAIN”?

Not that I’m a greenie or anything... but I had a mid-day meeting in town today and a bit of time up my sleeve. So seeing as we have a train station practically at the end of our street I thought I'd do the decent thing and try to save the planet, which apparently is warming at an alarming rate (here in Wellington we have yet to see any evidence of this – particularly this winter, more to come on this in a subsequent post – but the media assures me that this is the case). It was also ‘$2.00 Thursday’ – this happens on the second week of the school holidays and is a blatant attempt by TranzMetro (or KiwiRail, or whatever they like to be called these days) to bribe people that don’t normally take the train so that they can show them just what they’ve been missing.

Due to it’s geographic constraints Wellington actually ‘enjoys’ a relatively high amount of public rail transport compared with the rest of New Zealand where rail service is practically non-existent. The rail lines run more or less where you would expect them to and are within easy distance of many residential suburbs (apart from the southern or eastern suburbs – this was due to a bureaucratic oversight early last century when some clown decided to put a city in the way). But this winter they’ve had bad reviews. Not only are people actually freezing in the carriages (the heating systems have broken and TranzMetro refuses to carry spares to repair them) but the timetables are erratic and the infrastructure is run down, dilapidated and on the point of collapse. Which is why, last year, the outgoing government decided to pay top dollar and buy rail back, lock, stock and barrel, from the latest in a succession of private-sector companies that brought it and subsequently asset-stripped it (much to the delight of their shareholders).

The service this winter has actually been so bad that TranzMetro even reduced fares for monthly commuters July passes and announced that they would give all commuters FREE return trips on two selected Fridays. Unfortunately on the first of these nominated Fridays some fool of a TranzMetro contractor decided to start his part of the project a day early and brought the whole rail network to a standstill for six hours, starting with the morning rush period. TranzMetro’s failure to convey this information to many commuters was another source of frustration with many succumbing to frostbite while waiting on grotty, run-down and graffiti-laden platforms for trains that were never going to arrive.

Anyhow, this morning I came hurtling down the street and flung myself onto the platform just in time for the 11:23 train. Which failed to show up before 11:45, delivering me into Wellington 25 minutes late. Meaning that I was forced to ‘take it easy’ loitering on a grotty platform next to three brand new, but already severely defaced shelters before climbing into a run-down unit and travelling along the refuse-laden rail corridor into town. Meeting over I raced back to the Wellington station, missing my train, which had departed right on time, by less than a minute. I then had to ‘take it easy’ for another half hour before getting back to work.

“Take it easy, take the train”? Yeah, right!