Following on from my post this morning from looking at timetables I thought it would be worthwhile to show just how much the timetable has evolved since before Britomart. Here are the timetables that were brought in during 1998.
Western Line
Southern Lines
As you can see both timetables are pretty sparse compared to now. About the only thing that hasn’t changed is the frequency of the Saturday services on the Western line which are still stuck at hourly.
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Simply staggering that Saturday rail services on the western line have hardly changed since 1998.
Snap – still hourly, but now they start later…
Timetabled services are all slower:
Papakura-Newmarket, was 39mins, now 45mins
Henderson-Newmarket was 30mins, now 34mins (double tracking hasn’t helped)
That’s absolutely crazy. We spend nearly half a billion on improving the Western Line through Project DART and the trains are now slower than they were before that project.
That previous timetable was probably unrealistic. Regardless the major point of double tracking was to allow much more frequent running if trains, it would be impossible to have the frequency we have now or plan to have with EMUs without the two tracks. Imagine if you converted the Western motorway to a single lane for both directions.
My memory is western trains were usually 30 odd minutes late by the end of their journey in 1998, looonnnngggg waits at Avondale. It is 500 million times better with Dart!
I can vouch for it never keeping to those times unless the train was empty.
I was a schoolkid at the time of this timetable, catching the train in from Kingsland to Boston Rd even back in the day when Boston Rd only had three trains a day stopping there.
I used to always turn up at Kingsland at 8:20am to get the 8:13 train – it was almost always at least that late.
As the trains have gotten busier there tends to be longer dwell times. Also remember this is also to the old Auckland station, not to Britomart.
In 2000-2001, it would take about an hour, often a lot longer, to get from the old Auckland Station to Henderson. I seem to remember sitting at Avondale (or somewhere around there) for up to an hour some nights…
Just a thought on the lay out of the timetables: I reckon the old layout (and the one still used in Wellington) of having the stops along the vertical axis, is easier to understand. We should go back to that.
I definitely prefer the layout of the Western Line timetable above. Easier to scan down to see all the arrival times at your particular station. Scanning horizontally seems to give me a headache for some reason.
It feels right doesn’t it, you travel along your route, left to right; like reading a line.
We still have the vertical timetable at all the stations
In 1998 all the trains where DMU. The train timetable changed with the introduction of the locomotive pulled SA / SD train sets in about 2004 or 2005. The change was made because the locomotive hauled trains sets had significantly poorer aceleration rate as compared to the DMU.
Matt I hope you can digitise all the timetables you’ve got and archive them somewhere online.
Does the library have old timetables in their archives?