Cross River Rail (CRR)

I suspect there might be issues with shoulder peak frequency, as there will be too many trains in the inner core, and not enough at the outer termini to commence higher frequencies directly after peak. It would be an odd situation, but I guess 4 tph could commence an hour or two after peak has finished, after running 2 tph directly afterwards.

1 Like

Another possibility is to boost counter peak frequency by running more of the peak services as through services rather than terminating in the CBD. This would help to ensure more services in the outer termini.

6 Likes

It was also stated in estimates this year that the current timetable requires 111.5 six car sets.
https://forum.bettertransportqueensland.org/t/when-will-revenue-services-commence-in-cross-river-rail/706/22?u=ozbob

So there would appear to be an increase of 10.5 six car train requirement with the CRR timetable. It is interesting to speculate what these services might be.

3 Likes

The Gold Coast line could definitely benefit from a 3tph timetable but I’m not sure how it would interact with the Beenleigh stoppers and the Ferny Grove line (although you could run it at 10 minutes off-peak with half of the trains terminating either at Boggo Road, Coopers Plains or Kuraby.)

There’s also the issue of having to force half-hourly bus services on the GC and Logan to a 20 minute timetable, which would require a lot more effort.

4 Likes

The marginal cost for running more services does not favour 20 minute headways. Far and away most of the cost to the State to be able to provide train services at all is in the perway and its maintenance. If the fleet and track capacity is available, it is only a question of paying for more train crew.
To the extent I would support anything not based around a base offering of 15 minute headways every day of the week to nearly every station on the current network, it would be a 10 minute interpeak headway on the Ferny Grove to Cleveland corridor once CRR opens. (ā€œNearly every stationā€ to me means every station on every suburban line inwards of Ipswich and Caboolture except the Doomben line, or anywhere else it is not practical or feasible due to the track constraints, plus the Gold Coast line, plus The Wave rail segments.)

3 Likes

This is why I’m not a fan of 20 minute headways, due to the issue that it doesn’t work with standard 15 & 30 minute timetables in widespead use across on different modes across the wider region.

Implementing it would create far more issues that it’s worth, IMO. Better to wait for 15 minute train frequencies to become possible.

8 Likes

Agree. 15 minutes is less problematic. Although to be brutal around Goodna it wouldn’t matter as buses don’t make connections too often so a miss by 5 minutes would become a 15 minute wait :wink::woozy_face:

3 Likes

Reminds me of my uni days down on the GC - I lost count how many times the old Route 3 and Route 709 buses pulled into Helensvale Station just in time to wave goodbye to the departing train.

2 Likes

As per comments, off-peak and counter peak frequency improvements are possible provided crew available. Be a nice surprise!

2 Likes

I would love to see an immediate increase to 15 minute frequencies to Manly, Kuraby, Springfield Central, Kippa Ring, Shorncliffe and Airport. This would absolutely be possible to implement tomorrow, assuming crew numbers there.

In the meantime, why not make the Springfield and Kippa Ring peak frequencies every 7.5 minutes instead of 6-12 minutes. With the occasional gaps in between the 6 minute frequencies it’s still basically the same number of trains per hour per line and also easier to run in conjunction with the 15 minute base frequencies.

The rest I’d love to see increase as CRR and other upgrades come online.

5 Likes

add to this, can QR please stop running outbound trains on off peak frequencies, during peak hours. I rarely take the train anymore but I used to and the train would have a fair number of people on it.

5 Likes

Counter peak services need improvements for sure!

4 Likes

100%! With the number of dead running trains moving back and forwards, why can’t at least some of these be converted into revenue services?

4 Likes

Not sure if this is possible for Sector 1 post CRR, as they are limited in off-peak capacity in both ends by tri-track; peak-hour SC/Redcliffe trains running in the capacity of 2 tracks during peak would have to be funnelled into a single track after passing the CBD as the other two tracks will be taken by the peak-hour GC/Beenleigh trains.

I recon that a having southbound city-terminating SC/Redcliffe trains terminate at Yeerongpilly rather than Boggo Road as Yeerongpilly is right before Clapham yard. If the off-peak capacity from Boggo Road to Yeerongpilly will be limited post CRR, make best use of the capacity by running functioning services to Yeerongpilly rather than run ā€˜Special’ trains to Clapham yard, wasting capacity on that corridor.

4 Likes

Even if they terminate at Boggo Road they will have to run on dead to Clapham. So may as well be extended to Yeerongpilly. Some could be extended further out to better provide more counter peak capacity.

4 Likes

Would stopping all stations between Boggo Road and Yeerongpilly in contra-peak slow down the Gold Coast express pattern though, assuming that the 3rd track is used for the peak direction?

At the end this comes back to one of the main failings of CRR - the 3 track corridor they’ve retained! It’s going to be a struggle to increase counter-peak frequency when you’re trying to cram express and all stoppers onto the one track. Whenever the Beaudesert line becomes reality it’s going to get even worse.

The ā€˜best’ solution (as I see it) seems to be to quadruplicate the line either down to Salisbury or all the way to Kuraby and connect with LGCFR, but failing that I can see adding a 4th platform to a few stations and allowing express trains to overtake as a short-term solution. The JR companies are pretty consistently able to do intensive local & express operations on 2 track lines this way, and while I don’t think we’re at their level of timetabling precision I’d be shocked if it wasn’t workable for QR as well. Only problem with that one is we’ve JUST finished rebuilding all of those stations as 3 platform :facepalm:

3 Likes

By having GC trains stop all stations during off/counter peak, this would allow for extra capacity to allow 15min frequencies on the GC line. Would GC commuters rather only wait for 15min at the longest while having a slightly longer journey to the CBD, or would they rather save a few minutes off their journey time while still having to tank 30min waits. The trade-off is theirs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if QR terminates the trains at Boggo Road during peak-hour since ā€˜there wouldn’t be the demand’ for trains to terminate at Yeerongpilly.

1 Like

Agree but when I was using the Redcliffe Line outbound their were plenty of trains that had done their run into the city and were then dead running all the way back to Redcliffe to start their next revenue run into the city. Thats more so what I’m talking about.

1 Like