{"id":1421,"date":"2010-08-25T05:34:39","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T12:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1421"},"modified":"2010-08-26T21:26:43","modified_gmt":"2010-08-27T04:26:43","slug":"sydney-has-awesome-trains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1421","title":{"rendered":"Sydney has awesome trains"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a thing for trains<\/a>, so it’s a real pleasure to try them out in a new city and discover a well run, clean, on-time, easy-to-use system. Sydney’s CityRail<\/a> system certainly qualifies! I’ve ridden it a few times so far this trip and in addition to getting where I wanted to go, I observed some cool innovations.<\/p>\n

<\/a>First, the trains are double-decker. And who doesn’t enjoy being up high?<\/p>\n

Second, the seat backs flip to face forward or backward on a central pivot, so it’s easy for any passenger to change the direction of the seating depending which way the train is going. These are designed to pivot (up\/forward or down\/backward) in place, without banging into adjoining seats. Very clever.<\/p>\n

Most impressively, the escalators down to the subway level have adaptive speed<\/i>. At first I thought I was imagining the fact that the escalators seemed to be running at different speeds at different times. Then I realized that it was moving faster when a person was on it<\/i> and slower when unoccupied. I tested this a few times observationally, then went and got on it myself when it was in its slow state. Sure enough, it sped up when I stepped on. The speed transition is so smooth that I hadn’t noticed it<\/i> the times I’d been on the escalator before! This is brilliant, and apparently saves a lot of energy. I get the impression that it may not be at all new — it’s just the first time I’ve encountered it!<\/p>\n

Thank you, Sydney — and bring on more neat discoveries!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a thing for trains, so it’s a real pleasure to try them out in a new city and discover a well run, clean, on-time, easy-to-use system. Sydney’s CityRail system certainly qualifies! I’ve ridden it a few times so far this trip and in addition to getting where I wanted to go, I observed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1427,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}