GREAT SYSTEM

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 74, 28 March 1930, Page 10

GREAT SYSTEM

1400 TRAINS A DAY

SYDNEY'S GROWTH

(From "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, 20th March. Even its greatest enemy will admit that Sydney has a marvellous train service. With the growth of the suburbs'this has developed to tremendous proportions, and the safe manner in which it is handled is to the credit of the Department and its employees. Ten years ago 700 trains arrived and departed from the Central Railway Station each week day. Since then the daily total has grown to the amazing figure of 1400. When it was erected in 1908 the Central Station was regarded as hopelessly extravagant, but the ,ten platforms that were provided then have grown to 23, and even now, with the growth of the electric services, the engineers are thinking about the provision of auxiliary stations to copo with the increase of traffic in the next decade. Well over 120,000,000 passengers used the Central Station last year. In business hours alone every working day 144,000 passed through the barriers. Sometimes the trains arrive and depart at the rate of six a minute, and in all the press of traffic to the suburbs, country trains must be prepared and drawn up to. the platforms so that they may be ready to leave at their appointed times. Locomotives and trains weave their way across intricate points and crossings apparently in a hopeless muddle, yet during last year not a single person was injured in the yards at Central. Standing sentinel-liko over the maze of lines there are three signal boxes that, botween them, control 219 sets of points operated by compressed air, and 500 power-interlocked signals. The time-worn excuse of the office boy or of the typist who slept in that the "train was late again" is no longer a safe one in Sydney. Once, during the difficult times when the lines were overburdened with steam trains, and again during the process of electrification, it was often a toss-up whether a train would be on time or ten minutes or more late. Now there are days when every one of the trains runs to time —not a minute late. Bunning such a vast .number of trains to timo calls for a high degree of efficiency in both staff and equipment. Every train that passes over the immensely busy section during the first half-mile out from the Central Station operates 600 electrical signal devices all arranged for safety running. The system is complicated in the extreme, but it is foolproof.