Sunshine Coast Line - Fixed!

After excessive (and somewhat justifiable) complaining from those who wish to live miles from where they work, TransLink and QR will modify the Sunshine Coast Line timetable from Monday 11th July. The first change is the 5:04pm from Central to Caboolture will be extended to Nambour. BrizCommuter assumes that this will replace the rail bus that connected with the 4:52pm departure from Central? The 5:04pm service usually only has few passengers standing, so should easily cope with a few extra Sunshine Coast passengers. The overcrowded 5:21pm from Central to Nambour will now be curtailed to Caboolture, taking the pressure off this service. A new 5:28pm service from Central to Nambour has been created in it's place. Sensibly, stopping patterns remain the same to keep the timetable homogeneous. Well done to TransLink and QR for modifying these services so soon. However, lets just hope that this doesn't cause more services on other lines to be reduced from 6 to 3-car units.

Whilst the new times may not be the most convenient for the average CBD worker (and lets face it, the convenient timing caused the problem), this is still a significant improvement for the Sunshine Coast. Lets look at some facts. The Sunshine Coast Line will now have 3tph in the busiest evening peak hour - pretty impressive for a line with less than a quarter of the patronage of the Gold Coast Line! Between 5 and 5:30pm, the Sunshine Coast line will now have a service gap (at 24 mins) only 3 minutes longer than inner-city stations such as Windsor, Alderley, and Enoggera. 3tph is also 1tph more than a typical half hourly outer-suburban commuter service in the UK. Journey times are comparable or even faster to similar journey distances in Japan on non-premium fare services. Yet the Courier Mail's comments section is still full of unreasonable demands by Sunshine Coast commuters. Please Sunshine Coast commuters, you can now stop whinging - apart from on the subject of lack of toilets which is still an issue!