Dulcineasdiarycontinued: Tuesday 3rd & Wednesday 4th September 2019

Tuesday 3rd September 2019
Last week I was in Melbourne therefore missed my regular Tuesday Ramon's Jazz Express dance class at SDC. Today I went to my 2nd last class until after the Blackmores Sydney Running Festival 10 km Bridge Run in mid September.

There is so much on in September in Sydney with more work, trade shows and events to attend. No time to travel interstate this month.

Apologies for me still catching up on last weekend's blog. It was quite a busy week.

Wednesdays 4th September 2019
What a perfect day ( no sign of rain, the sun is out and it is nice and warm - it is certainly the beginning of Spring!) to take the train down to the Southern suburbs of Sydney - yes South to Loftus Station on the Illawarra Line. It is not often I venture South although I grew up in my early years of life in Hurstville.

So where is Loftus? It is South of Sutherland but not as South as Waterfall which is not as South as Wollongong. And where is Sutherland? It is South of Hurstville.

OK arrived at Loftus Station I wonder why anyone would want to live here, well they don't - next to the station is Loftus TAFE and a little further down is Wollongong University Campus. Further down it is the Royal National Park yep into bushland.

I arrived around 11.40 am however the next tram did not depart the tram stop at the Sydney Tram Museum or is it called Loftus Tram Museum?? until 12 pm. This gave me time to look around the huge collection of vintage trams and even a few double decker buses in the tram shed with all its other paraphernalia and take heaps of old photos of different trams in operation.

The Sydney Tram Museum is open Sundays and Wednesdays from 10 am. On Wednesday the museum closes at 3 pm a little earlier then on Sundays when it closes around 4 pm however last Sunday ( Fathers Day) it advertised a closing time of 5 pm). An adult day ticket costs $18 although the flyer inside the tramshed advertised $20 - Has there been a recent price increase? Is the Sunday adult day ticket more expensive to a Wednesday adult day ticket? Different price for special event/holiday days????

I texted my manager with photos of some trams and my tram ticket as her husband is a train spotter and tram enthusist. $18 for an adult day ticket is rather expensive considering the daily travel rate on public transport in Sydney is capped at $15 per day - well it is supposed to be anyway! I stopped checking my Opal card - I just assume the electronic tap on tap off technology is correctly calculating my daily and weekly public transport usage!

There were loads of volunteers working at the tram museum - more volunteers working then the only 6 passengers riding the trams the entire day. You buy your ticket on board the tram from the conductor which is an old fashioned retangular blue cardboard printed ticket which is reminiscent of the hard rectangular green cardboard printed tickets from my childhood days riding the buses and trains around Sydney's suburbs.

I had time to board at least 2 different trams which ran hourly to Sutherland and down to the national park returning to the tram museum.

The first tram was quite old and took a lot longer with a lot of stopping and starting to reach the end of the line at Sutherland and the national park. The doors were manual opening - wait there were actually no doors on this restored vintage tram, the seats were hard but you could change them to face the direction of travel - reminds me of the very similar seats on the old rattlers (trains) I used to travel on as a child in the 1970s. I was surprised that the trams actually had to cross a rather busy main road to get across to the national park - imagine the frustration of drivers having to stop and wait twice every hour on a Wednesday between 10 am and 3 pm and even more frequently every Sunday between 10 am and 5 pm just for a series of old trams to cross! The horns of the trams and the dinging of the railway crossing signals are sure loud enough to warn drivers that a tram is approaching.

The second tram I rode on was a Japanese tram - look electric doors that opened and shut automatically with the driver's press of a button! Well almost, the doors of the tram did fail to open with a press (or quite a few presses) of a button from inside the tram on the correct side of the tram to let us out when it arrived back at the Sydney Tram Museum tram stop therefore a volunteer had to pry open one of the tram's doors from the outside of the tram with brute force. We were actually trapped inside the tram - that's unlike Japanese technology!

It was a much smoother ride though and there was a different arrangement of seats on board. At the end of the line in the national park where the trams terminate and return to the museum depot sheds is a rather long and simple disused railway platform made of concrete with a continuous triangular corrugated metal roof. There is nothing left of it except it's structure - no seats no buildings. This, I was told, used to be a very popular steam train station accessing the national park but as motor vehicles became more popular so did the decline in the train's passenger numbers. Today it is only used as the end of the line for Sydney Tram Museum. The tram stops here very briefly for a photo opportunity before heading back in the direction it came from after a manual change over of the trolley cable. Because the old disused platform was made for a steam train and not for a tram which is a lot lower to the ground, it is impossible to alight onto the platform, exiting the tram is on the opposite side stepping onto the ground as the platform is at window level of the trams ( the same side the automatic doors failed to open upon arrival back at The Sydney Tram Museum. If the doors had failed to open in the national park we would really have been trapped inside the tram - the end of the line is unmanned usually so the only way out of the tram would have been to try and squeeze out of the windows as I did not spot any emergency exits on the tram! I just hope the automatic tram doors don't fail on a day the tram fails to restart or if there is a bush fire!)

I did not wait for the next and probably final tram ride on a different tram for the day as it was getting late and I wanted to have a better look at the collecton of trams inside the tram shed.

After one final look at the trams in the tram shed it was time to walk up the hill and cross the overhead bridge to catch the train from the other platform of Loftus Station back to Town Hall changing onto another train to Chatswood and a bus home. It is a really nice train ride down to Loftus and even better on a perfect Spring day like today. End of another one of my adventures. I was not alone on my trip back to Town Hall I made friends with an old retired man who was also a transport enthusiast and we talked about all things trams and trains all the way to Redfern where he alighted the train.

In summary after visiting the tram museum, I still don't get why all the rolling stock of trams were burnt and all the tracks pulled out - total waste of resources since now the government is putting all the tracks back in and importing a whole new series of trams ( which are already probably a decade old in technology!)

Photos below