While I'm more than happy to pull out the soapbox on my PAD I don't normally like to kvetch two days in a row. Indeed I'd much rather a hassle-free life where I didn't have to grumble at all, but you cain't always get what you want.

There was a time when the reliability of our train service was appalling. It hit its nadir when, for 7 days out of 10, our train service was cancelled. A new (slower) timetable introduced a couple of years back remedied that to a very large extent but lately, it's been slipping back into its old ways. In this case I allowed myself the "luxury" of catching a later train than I normally do since it was Friday. But as you can see... it didn't come. (Well, it did, it rattled through the station 1 minute after its due time to make up time.)

The next one was 18 minutes away. What you can't see here is that it's always a 6 carriage dinosaur left over from the '70's and with its normal load plus half of our train's load on, it becomes a sardine can. That means waiting for the following one, half an hour away.

Perhaps I wouldn't have been tempted to gripe about it even then but January is the time for a lot of businesses to put up prices, and City Rail is no exception.

According to the Bureau Of Statistics inflation is running at about 3%. Hmm. Really. Let me ponder some of the recent price rises.
Coffee at work's canteen: Up 12%.
Breakfast at said canteen, when I don't bring my own: Up 4%
Rent: Up 7.41% over the last year.
Oh here's a good one; electricity charges per kw/h over the last year: Up 18.73%.
And a CityRail weekly ticket? Up 6.25%

For a decreasingly reliable service. Yeah, I don't begrudge that. Much.

Granted not everything has gone up but I can find very few things that have gone down aside from interest rates, and then not by much. So as for the ABS's "3%" inflation rate; what was it Disraeli is reputed to have said about "lies, damned lies and statistics"?

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