Sydney Heatwave

So, Friday was the hottest day ever recorded in Sydney's Central Business District. It hit an unimaginable 45.8 at Observatory Hill just before 2.00pm, breaking a record high that had stood since January 1939. There was a wall of heat in the city. Thanks to the lack of sea breeze, the mercury soared far higher than the expected CBD top. You could not be outside and hope to escape the heat. It was just incredible, a blanket that seemed to be suffocating the entire city.

Getting home on Friday was a disaster. I mean, it's hot, abnormally so, and you can expect that the trains might be having problems coping - people certainly were. But how do you explain thing like trains sitting alongside platforms for as long as 30 minutes without any announcement on the platform or in the carriages. At least, none that were in what I would call passable English. They were garbled or else spoken at quickfire rate by people who had a distinct accent. Just as well they're all going to the Australian Radio School, or whatever it's called, for their training from now on.

This isn't a knock on those folks, who're doing what they're told. It's a knock on City Rail not understanding how much people need to know what's going on in this sort of situation and making arrangements whereby there are people with clear voices who are well-spoken and precise behind the microphones. That would help. The thing that people complained about the most was the lack of information being passed along. Everyone understood that the heat was causing problems. You knew it before you went to the station. Not hearing much of anything worthwhile gets people angry.

Also, it would be wonderful for City Rail and the NSW Government to perhaps leap ahead in these technological times and run fully air-conditioned trains everywhere, like in any other civilised city in the world. As I tweeted from Town Hall Station on Friday:

It's damn near criminal for City Rail to be running non-air conditioned trains on a day where it reached 40 in the city! #heatwave #CityRail

And it's true. Traveling on those silver trains for any length of time - like, for example, City to Liverpool via Bankstown - had to be a fresh kind of hell. Hot, with no breeze, and a full trian because of so many previously cancelled ones. Luckily, I managed, through more good luck than good management, to snag a train that was air-conditioned. 

After traversing the City Circle, we stopped at Central and had to wait for a new driver. There was another train on the adjacent platform, one that wasn't air-conditioned. A PA announcement was made that the other train would be leaving in two minutes, to the same destination as the one we were on. Less than a quarter of the packed train left the cool of the Waratah train for the silver rattler. I don't blame them.

City Rail, something has to be done! I know it isn't always this hot, but those rattlers are approaching unbearable on days when the ambient temperature isn't much over 30. I don't even want to imagine what it was like on Friday. One day, someone's going to get on one of those things on a hot day, have a serious heat-related illness and then there'll be hell to pay.

Thank God the cool change came through Friday night!!