At Town Hall station? You breathe this!

02 October 2008 in Photography, Sydney by Stilgherrian | 5 comments

Photograph of filthy air vent at Town Hall station

This is the air vent in the elevator between platforms 1/2 and 4 at Sydney’s Town Hall station. Do you like that layer of black crap?

Town Hall station is already hot, humid, smelly and dangerously over-crowded. Add to these risks the fact that you’re breathing whatever it is that’s accumulating up there.

While taking this photo with my trusty but battered Nokia N80 the other day, I expected someone to question me — concerned that I was a terrorist or something. I reckon terrorists are the least of your worries here.

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  1. Michael Meloni’s avatar

    Michael Meloni on 02 October 2008 at 9:07 am

    Why can’t someone make train stations cool? At least the covered ones. Surely it couldn’t be that hard. Toowong Station in Brisbane is the only station I know of up here that has air circulator things on the platform. Central is like a sauna.

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  2. Stilgherrian’s avatar

    Stilgherrian on 02 October 2008 at 5:01 pm

    @Michael Meloni: While I haven’t travelled much, I can confirm that in hot, humid Bangkok the subway is pleasantly air-conditioned. The NSW state government has no excuse but their own incompetence.

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  3. yewenyi’s avatar

    yewenyi on 02 October 2008 at 5:07 pm

    When I used to go caving, caves were always cool pleasant places. Sydney’s underground is the exact opposite. I do not know how they manage it, I mean they even have trains acting like plungers pumping air through the system. I think it is the humidity that kills things. An aircon would reduce this problem.

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  5. Mikey’s avatar

    Mikey on 14 October 2008 at 5:09 pm

    Why are Sydney’s trains sooooo bad? Even American cities manage to put Sydney to shame – the Metro in Washington DC, the BART in San Francisco, the NY subway, the New Jersey PATH trains. For heavens sake, even LA manages to run a train service in better shape than Sydney. Dirty trains; rundown and crowded stations; increasingly grumpy and unpleasant commuters. 14 bucks to ride to the airport from the city on what is otherwise a regular, beaten up City Rail train? Why does it take two or three people waving flags on the platform; a guard and a driver to accomplish what most other cities achieve with one, or even no people? I could go on and on and on … but I have a train to catch.

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