Countrywide train strike on Monday

This coming Monday (10 May 2010) is going to be a countrywide train strike. There will be thick traffic on the roads for days. It will be expensive for petrol. Metrorail was already refunding all of the monthly train tickets. At least two unions are striking over a wage dispute.

Metrorail Cape Town prices going up in April 2010

The Metrorail prices in Cape Town are going up in April 2010. This is probably because of the electricity price increase from Eskom.

Metrorail annoyances

The last couple of days have not been a great experiences for Metrorail customers in the Cape Town area.

There have been several cancellation announcement in the morning while people need to get to work as well as announcements of delays. Often the delays are caused due to signal power failure. After all of these years of that, I would expect engineering to come up with a way to make these more robust that a slight drizzle doesn't kill the entire system.

Yesterday morning was another great example where trains were just standing on the tracks two sides of a station. I know that they were not waiting for a line change due to construction work going on. Yesterday evening was a case of an announcement of a delay of 8 minutes and about 13 minutes later when the next train was scheduled to show up, there was an announcement of a delay of 12 minutes. This morning was at least nothing happening for 20 minutes.

Metrorail annoyances

The last couple of days have not been a great experiences for Metrorail customers in the Cape Town area.

There have been several cancellation announcement in the morning while people need to get to work as well as announcements of delays. Often the delays are caused due to signal power failure. After all of these years of that, I would expect engineering to come up with a way to make these more robust that a slight drizzle doesn't kill the entire system.

Yesterday morning was another great example where trains were just standing on the tracks two sides of a station. I know that they were not waiting for a line change due to construction work going on. Yesterday evening was a case of an announcement of a delay of 8 minutes and about 13 minutes later when the next train was scheduled to show up, there was an announcement of a delay of 12 minutes. This morning was at least nothing happening for 20 minutes.