Macquarie Dictionary names 'AI slop' as word of the year 2025: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-25/ai-slop-named-macquarie-dictionary-word-of-the-year-2025/106047682

"The ‘rubble films’ were intended to help make sure none of that could ever happen again, and in that, they are among the many intriguing failures of twentieth century culture." - Owen Hatherley thequietus.com/culture/film...

Even contemporary speculative fiction set in the 2050s knows High Speed Rail in Australia is a bust, as stated in this excerpt from Andrew Roff’s ‘These are my demands’ (2025).

Another item from the auction: A reproduction VR poster from Harold Freedman’s ‘Men of Service’ series. Freedman was a war artist in WW2 and later the state artist for Victoria. His major works include the ‘cavalcade of transport’ & ‘the legend of fire’ murals in Melbourne.

Another auction haul: a 1989 map of rail infrastructure in inner Melbourne including the now gone Melbourne Freight Terminal, Hump Yard & the now cut line to Webb Dock & rail sidings in the Port of Melbourne.

It wouldn’t have been a 1970s childhood in Sydney unless you saw this ad…” Electronic Sales & Rentals, 6-4-8-0… 1-double 0!” youtu.be/wPFnaTf36Es

Picked up at auction recently what looks like a full set of CountryLink A4 size holiday brochures from 1998. All bar the North West brochure feature the XPT. A bonus was the ‘welcome aboard’ brochure pre-1994 (no mention of sleeping cars). Enjoy! P.S. they might be for sale if people are interested.

Did a flying visit to Melbourne over the weekend. Only rail action of note was this video of a late running ST22 XPT out of Southern Cross station bound for Sydney races out of twilight into the night as it passes the Beckett St level crossing at Glenroy in Melbourne’s north on Saturday 1 November.

I wouldn't tell anyone I'd won the lottery, but there would be signs... www.bbc.com/news/article...

Transport Canberra bus #400 having a bit of an identity crisis today: TC at the front, ACTION on the back & sides.

OTD in 2014: in your own time Ablo…

Remembering Sonny Terry on his birthday 🎂 At Pete Seeger’s cabin in Beacon, New York 📷 David Gahr, 1958 "In them days I just as soon died - except for my harmonica. It was like a friend who didn’t give a damn if I could see or not."

A couple of minutes away from its arrival at Canberra (Kingston) station, the SP31 service from Sydney rolls through Fyshwick at 11.07 this morning.

This is a valid conclusion but is not new knowledge.An understanding of modern Japanese history & a few English language sources (esp. Hosokawa’s ‘Old Man Thunder’) led many others to the same conclusion decades ago (including me).

Who's solving the Louvre robbery? Right answers only… Good Moaning…

A half-decent textbook on Australian geology (I recommend Laseron & Brunschweiler’s ‘Ancient Australia’) will provide a much richer insight into truly deep time before humans. This book is where I learned the Pilbara has some of the oldest known rocks in the world (c. 2 billion years).

Only a couple of minutes after departing Canberra station, the Sydney-bound SP34 Xplorer service passes through the industrial suburb of Fyshwick at midday, Sunday 19 October.

Today’s mail call: A bit out of my usual collecting path, this is a superb original example of a Qantas airlines poster from the 1950s advertising their new Lockheed Super Constellation airliner, the last of the great turboprop airliners before the arrival of the Boeing 707 & Douglas DC-8 jets.

Informed Sources say last Friday TfNSW issued an RFT for a technical adviser to determine “the minimum viable product for rolling stock for NSW Trainlink to continue to offer a sleeper service between Sydney and Melbourne” and prepare technical artifacts to support a Final Business Case (FBC).

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand: Signal passed at Danger

Had a great day yesterday with an old friend Brad on the Botany Line which serves Sydney’s main container port & looking at traces of many sidings & branches once serving industries nearby. The main traffic these days are port shuttles from suburban & regional terminals. Captions: Alt text

Similar to Australia right now. The non-US Anglosphere needs to focus on their own problems.

Yeah, yeah. I know. America is important. But I'm so fucking sick of it absolutely dominating the UK news cycle. I get it. You voted in a turd and now you're swimming in fascist shit. But we have our own rightwing wanklord problems that need more national coverage.

OTD in 2018: Probably my favourite photo i took that year, with export EMD SD-40 unit C507 leading an empty grain train up Demondrille bank near Harden in southern NSW. Very atmospheric & its about as close as I'll ever get to experiencing a pre-1995 'Jet' freight blasting uphill from Bacchus Marsh.

There are some subjects that really don't require a 'take'.

Sad news to hear about the man who stayed off to the side while Clapton, Beck & Page stood in the limelight. RIP Chris Dreja. Will play this off ‘Roger the Engineer’ for you tonight.

RIP Chris Dreja, player of the other guitar while we were busy listening to whoever was deemed more important than the rest of the Yardbirds at the time. Here’s just one track he made happen at least as much as Jeff Beck did. www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlif...

When I turn on my TV I don't want to select a profile, see a load of adverts and apps then press guide then scroll to a channel and press select. I want it to immediately tune to BBC1 or ITV like TVs did successfully for decades. This is not progress.

tbf i think this UP-NS merger is a step on the way to precipitating an xk-class "end of the railroad" scenario. monopoly power is not going to attract shippers to rail

The only good Scrum is one fed by a half-back. The rest is bullshit.

The replies to this thread prove the iron rule of social media: the non-US anglosphere has all these common cultural touchstones (see @looksunfamiliar.bsky.social ), but inevitably the Americans turn up and spoil it for the rest of us with unwanted attempts at equivalency.

Friday mail call: A 1990 report by the Australian Rail Industry Council, another key document that set the parameters for the micro-economic reform of the rail industry in the 1990s (corporatisation, service contractions, reducing sizes of railway workforces).

The midday train (SP33) from Sydney was 35 minutes late when it arrived into Canberra today on a warm, windy spring afternoon at 4.55pm, only 5 minutes before its scheduled 5pm departure time to Sydney of. Luckily the practiced NSW Trainlink crews turned the train around quickly to leave at 5.19pm.

Not everything has to be 'a journey'. Sometimes you can just do stuff.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a late 1990s QR poster advertising the speed of the new Electric Tilt Train (first image). I wasn’t sure if it was part of a wider campaign until I saw the second image from May 2000’s Railway Digest, showing a billboard beside the Queensland North Coast Line.

Yesterday’s mail call #3: A booklet from Australian National Railways (successor to Commonwealth Railways) circa 1978-9 to provide an update on progress in constructing the new railway to Alice Springs (NT) from Tarcoola (SA).

Yesterday’s mail call #2: A 1978 brochure from the Railways of Australia (RoA) advertising fares & timetables for interstate rail travel. The RoA was formed in the mid-1960s to market passenger & freight services across Australia’s state-based railway systems, both nationally & internationally.

As a last minute passenger boards the train, NSW Trainlink’s SP34, the fully booked 1205 departure for Sydney whistles out of Canberra railway station on a clear and blustery spring day - Saturday 20 September 2025.

Today’s mail call bought more rail goodies. This document from 50 years ago is the menu for the commemorative dinner that marked the start of construction for the new railway to Alice Springs (in Australia’s Northern Territory) via Tarcoola in South Australia in April 1975.

It's slower. It costs more. It delivers fewer transport benefits for Canberrans. Read PTCBR Deputy Chair Ryan Hemsley argue why it's time to bury the "Barton dogleg" route for light rail to Woden.

Does this mean the Pacific Islands Regiment will re-appear on the Australian Army’s order of battle? If so, would it be one of the more highly-decorated units on the Orbat?

“Up, up Cronulla”. #CronullaDelendaEst

With the imminent demolition of the Kemp Street overbridge at Junee for Inland Rail works, here’s a photographic tribute to one of the best photo spots in town. Go well into the long night… Captions in alt text.

We are going to start seeing a boom in AI-powered "digital twins" as replacements for natural observations in environmental impact assessments. Just a wave of eco-slop to justify the development of new extractive industries based on the fever-dreams of black box models.

A good, short read on options & priorities for upgrading Australia’s mainline rail network.

Let's boycott documentary films until they stop playing music in the background of interviews. It brings nothing to the moment beyond making it harder to hear what is being said.

I built a web tool so anyone can design and evaluate ridership and costs of high speed rail networks anywhere in the world: railmapper.net

Lift your game, science fiction writers. Anything could be different in the future, but women are still under the jackboot of the patriarchy. (From 2018) 📚🪐 🧪

The modern world in old Ladybird books. ‘A modern signal box’ (The Story of Railways, 1961) Artist: Robert Ayton