I'm sitting in the quiet carriage, as is my wont, southward bound for home on the Friday afternoon. I hear a phone ring. The inconsiderate jackass answers it. He has walked right to the end of the platform to get on the quiet carriage so that he can read, sleep or study as the case may be without needing to hear the incessant buzz of other people's conversations given that many people these days can't shut the **** up for even five consecutive minutes and constantly need to hear themselves talking. This is something that quiet carriages are supposed to provide a respite from for people who have to commute for hours a day. But he doesn't concern himself with whether other people have to hear him.

He's being told about an accident that presumably a relative had with his car; no injuries, just vehicle damage. Hopefully nothing trivial. He tells the person on the other end that he's getting annoyed by them not providing enough details. I'm getting annoyed hearing the sound of his damn voice when I'm trying to read my calculus textbook. One of the small advantages of most of my line having no reception once you get past Waterfall is that the phone mouths are silenced, whether they want to be or not. However that's another 10 minutes or so down the line.

We don't make it that far. There's a loud bang, and the air conditioning goes off just as we go over Georges River. The conductor eventually announces that we've lost all power to the front four carriages. (The lights are still on which could be down to batteries, or it could be power being fed from the rear four car set.) We were therefore going to go to the next station so that the driver could take a look and see what had happened. That happened to be Como station.

As you can see here, the news was not good. The pantograph, which extends above the train to get power from the wire was clearly broken on the first carriage. We therefore had to disembark and two trainloads of passengers had to pile on to the next train, which was also delayed as result of our incident.

The net result is that we eventually got home, but it's 50 minutes late. It's better than it might have been in days past, though. To give the rail service its due it has become much better at handling service disruptions over the last few years.