The schedule says that we will have full operations tomorrow – great to see a ‘test run‘ just now.

Not sure it will be very efficient if it needs six people in fluoro vests to walk in front of each one 😉

Well done all round

Several people have asked me about the ‘noise rules’.  How noisy can it be?  What about at night?

There is no easy answer but the best news is that MOST of the work will be done during weekdays and Saturdays.  Night works will be fairly uncommon

I waded through the many pages and distilled it down to Understanding Metro Tunnel noise limits – apologies that it is quite detailed.

MMRA have their own fact sheet that is also quite good, a little more polished 🙂

MM-FACT-SHEET-Noise-Vibration-MAY-2017

If you’re wondering what it will look like from Wednesday, this is it

There’s a few things to note

• There will be one car lane in to the city and one lane out of the city.
• Trams will run normally.  The stops will be at Toorak Rd (existing stop) and a new stop on the city side of Park St.  The “old” Domain super stop has gone.
• We will not have any car parking out the front.
• St Kilda Rd towards the city will deviate to the far side from in front of the old Police Building.
• You will still be able to get to Bowen Cres (and our top car park)
• You will still have driveway access to the St Kilda Rd carpark.  But you will need the stop/go person to assist you.  It is also worth noting that to exit that car park you will turn right from the car park and join the traffic heading to the city – effectively a U turn.
• Albert Rd is already in its ‘final’ configuration – traffic in both directions is on the city side of the park.
• Pedestrians will be able cross the works area at Park St.
• Walking to the city on the opposite side of St Kilda Rd, looks a bit tricky.  Seems you will need to loop up near the fountain, around Cobbers Statue.

All of this was in the info sent out some time back but thought a quick refresher may be handy.  This is not an official position but my reading of the info provided.

You should also be aware that my best guess is that our trees will be removed next week.

The next stage is a big hole on the city of the station box, starting in May.  Our ‘big hole’ will occur in the Sept – Dec time frame (I think)

No night time action recorded last night, but here is the view from yesterday (including a mystery arm)

Was it just me, or was it nosier last night??  They had the road profiler out there around 230am!

Here is the timelapse of the overnight work

The best timelapse ever is here

Shows them laying the sleepers and rail overnight…and the photo is today’s dawn

Here is the video of  today’s work

Now that we have Bowen Cres open again at St Kilda Rd, my new best friend, Tom from the City of Port Phillip, paid us a visit.

He agreed that the bays on the south side of Bowen Cres – the old police bays – should be converted for public use.  It is likely that the bay nearest St Kilda Rd, will be a commercial bay and the rest will be public bays.  No final decision yet but likely to be one hour paid bays.

Tom also checked out Queens Lane, behind 1 Queens Rd.  He is proposing to make a few improvements there too.

All will take a few weeks – but we’re nearly there.

He could not commit, but will also try and improve the entry /exit at Toorak Rd / Queens Lane.  It would involve smoothing the kerbing.

Thanks City of PP especially Tom, Rebecca and Bernadene 🙂

I’m sure I am not the only one that has noticed that it has been very dark outside The Botanica lately.  They have had to turn off the street lights to allow them to do some electrical work.

I understand that they checked on the first night and decided the site lights gave enough light.  It seems some of those site lights have been moved and we now have an issue.

The fine line is that we don’t really want a big bank of lights on our footpath blinding us all but it MUST be safe.

Tonight they will walk around and make it safe.

They have designed a proper solution for when we have our own big hole out the front…but that is later in the year