The area serving platforms 12 and 13 lies deep in the bowels of Flinders Street station. It is like an oven in summer (thanks to an underground location with no natural air movement), and baltic in winter (thanks to no sunlight). It is surely the most miserable platform at Flinders Street.
It is a place that you want to leave as fast as possible. Nobody of sound mind wants to linger there. One way to leave P12/13 is to get on a train. When catching a train, minimising exposure to P12/13 can be difficult. Your train is late, or just doesn't turn up. Very quickly, you start to feel claustrophobic as the platform gets overcrowded. Is there enough oxygen down there to keep two rush hour train loads of people alive?
But let's get to the point of this post. The other time that you are likely to feel a strong desire to leave P12/13 is when your train has just arrived there (probably late).
You muscle your way out of the carriage with a hoard of other frustrated commuters. Already running a bit late, you want to quickly get out of the station and on your way to work. And then you are blocked by a wall of people struggling up the stairs that lead to daylight and fresh air. A few wretched soles are attempting to come down the stairs as the wave of people pushes upward at a snails pace.
Why is the stairway so narrow you ask yourself as you queue up, trying to not bump into the person in front, as those behind push you forward. And why is that bloody escalator not working?
That stairway that we trudge up each day used to be a lot wider. And it used to work pretty well. There was enough room for people to go up and down at the same time,without resorting to the use of martial arts. And then a genius within the public transport system had the brilliant idea of removing part of the stairway and installing an escalator.
The installation took an age. Not as long as the roll out of Myki, but much longer than it should have. Whilst the works were ongoing, the genius designer expected the same volume of commuters to squeeze into a space that was significantly smaller than it had previously been. But, big deal, the genius said to him/her self, those guys won't be inconvenienced for long, and they'll love the new gadget. They'll no longer need to exert themselves by climbing those pesky stairs.
I remember very well how annoying the "temporary" narrowing of the stairway was. This was at least partly due to almost being assaulted by another passenger. Trying to catch a train one day, I was forced to battle down the stairs as a wall of new arrivals came up, gasping for air. It was a very hot Melbourne summer day, 40C plus, and there were cranky people everywhere. Even people who didn't have to catch a Metro service were cranky. Most of the people coming up the stairs made a good effort to leave a little room for me to squeeze past them on my journey down into the oven. But one chap decided that he wasn't going to budge an inch. We met head on, and bumped chests with a thud. He opened with an f-word, followed swiftly by the c-word, and suggested in a forthright manner that I should wait at the top of the stairs until everybody had gone by. I replied, in a polite but equally forthright manner that my train was about to leave and I wanted to catch it. Further colourful language ensued, and I'm sure that if there had been room to throw a punch, he'd have done so. Fortunately, I somehow found a gap, and escaped the maniac. The last he heard of me was a muffled shout of "tosser" as the doors of a late Sandringham bound train almost crushed me. If the genius hadn't ever had the escalator idea, this ugly scene would have been avoided.
Finally, the escalator was complete, and Sandringham commuters could enjoy the tremendous convenience that it provided. By taking the escalator, it was possible to reach the platform 0.25 seconds faster than by taking the stairs, and with a saving of energy equivalent to 0.0000057 of a Mars bar. We were so blessed.
And then, within what felt like just a few days (I don't know the exact timing, as I was less anal about these things back then), the bloody escalator stopped working. And we were back to using a stairway that was too narrow for the volume of people.
The escalator has been out of service more than it has been in service. Sometimes it has has been closed for several weeks at a time.
Why does this bother me so much? Simply because, having successfully reached Flinders Street on my morning commute, almost always behind schedule, I then have to navigate the stairway from hell. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to walk the short distance from the train doorway to the station exit, and almost always involves being bumped and jostled.
If only that genius hadn't had such a great idea.
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