I'm writing this on 15 November 2022, just shy of 10 years after this shot was taken. Why now? First, I needed a shot from my old Canon days to see whether PBase's photo uploader would recognise my Canon lenses in a way that it definitely doesn't for my Olympus ones. (Spoiler: it doesn't work for Canon either.) Second, when I was looking at my PAD gallery for 2012 I noticed gaps. A LOT of gaps. Gaps which I clearly intended to "fill in later"... but never did.

So here we are, wondering where almost a decade has gone to. Again.

Was this the best shot that I took on a distant early Saturday morning following a night of rain? I would say no, and perhaps some of the others will follow into other galleries at a later time. But hey... 10 years and all that. However it's the one which is most relevant to the theme.

Note some prominent items on the platform. First, a public phone (or payphone, if you prefer). Once ubiquitous (even back then), now relatively rare. As a condition of privatisation, Telstra, the former government communications authority, was required to maintain a Universal Service Obligation. That means making basic telephony available to everyone who needs it, and maintaining public phones in case of emergency. (Albeit the number has reduced from about 36,000 in 2001 to around 15,000 20 years later.) In August 2021 the then CEO of Telstra announced that public phones would be free. Some interesting statistics were in the press release; in 2020 there were still 11 million calls made on payphones, including 230,000 to the emergency 000 number. (999 if you're in the UK, 911 in America, 112 in Italia.)

In reality the cost of collecting the coins or maintaining the pay points on the payphones probably wasn't worth it to Telstra, so the removal of the call cost was good PR at relatively low effective cost. 11 million calls sounds like a lot, but over the 15,000 phone network it averages out at 733 per phone per year, or around 2 calls per day.

As best I recollect the phone is still there in 2022 though since I have not been to my office since April (another thing that would have been inconceivable back in 2012), I've not been through Thirroul Station for a while now.

Now look behind it and to the right. That was a ticket machine. That huge array of buttons on the front covered pretty much every station on the greater Sydney network, and to buy a ticket you would start by pressing the one that corresponded to your destination. Now THAT machine is definitely gone, and indeed its last days had already started. At the end of 2012 a tap on, tap off card called Opal (modelled in part on the London Oyster system) started to be introduced. The rollout was completed for trains in April 2014, and for the entire public transport network by December of 2014.

By 2016 paper tickets were completely withdrawn, and machines like this? You'll now only see them in museums... or in photos that someone took a decade ago, and never got around to posting until now.