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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.