A-Series on the JOONDALUP LINE | Joondalup to Fremantle Express Services!!! - MSWA Ocean Ride 2023

Описание: In the early hours of the morning on Sunday the 12th of November 2023, the MSWA Ocean Ride (https://mswaoceanride.org.au) was held, starting at 6AM for the longest route from North Fremantle. To accomodate for all the cyclists expected to show up, Transperth provided express services from the Joondalup and Mandurah Lines to North Fremantle (then terminating at Fremantle). Due to North Fremantle being a 100m platform, the maximum possible length of train able to run would be a 4-car, and this is exactly what happened to allow for maximum capacity for all the anticipated passengers, especially with the extra room as a result of the longitudinal seating on the A-series, allowing for bikes to fit on! This meant that A-series trains were brought back into passenger service on the freeway lines for the first time since 2017!

Four trains ran from Joondalup, express to Greenwood, express to Stirling, express to Perth, express to Claremont, express to North Fremantle, then Fremantle. These departed Joondalup at 4:24AM, 4:44AM, 5:04AM and 5:24AM. Only one service operated on the Mandurah Line, departing from Cockburn Central at 4:44AM and stopping at Bull Creek, Elizabeth Quay, Claremont, North Fremantle and Fremantle. It did not even stop at Perth Underground and ran express through because I believe it is closed in such early hours of the morning, plus the other trains were already stopping at Perth. Finally, extra Fremantle Line services ran starting at Perth and stopping only at Claremont and North Fremantle along the way too, allowing for a 10 minute frequency along the Fremantle Line section.

The reason for these very abnormal skipping patterns was that they expected so many cyclists to turn up that stopping at every station would be extremely slow loading them all on, so they only stopped at limited stops to reduce dwell times at stations. However, in reality, there wasn't actually that many cyclists from what I witnessed, so the express was pretty pointless, and trains just ended up having to wait at stations for their scheduled departure times, but I'm not complaining, it was all the more interesting on top of the already incredible event of having A-series on the line!

So anyway, now that I've explained everything, this video just features me and ‪@Pigeon_journey‬ catching the first Joondalup Line express train at 4:24AM from Joondalup, and filming the (almost) full journey on this incredible express service (hence the long video duration). The driver was rather confused and left Joondalup early unknowing of the exact operations of the service, almost leaving me behind! I hope you enjoy this exclusive, rare footage of this occasion which honestly I thought I would never experience again. Unfortunately though, being so early it is of course still dark and we all know my phone doesn't perform that great in such conditions, but it is the best that I can do. This of course also means we can't see much of the views out the window as we traverse down the median of the Mitchell Freeway in an A-series which is very unfortunate too, but we do hear some rather high-speed sounds for an extended duration of time which would not otherwise be heard on the heritage lines. Furthermore, there was no one available to go and film the Mandurah Line service, since it stupidly started at Cockburn so enthusiasts living in Rockingham and such were not able to catch it... Hopefully the event runs again next year and we can instead go and film a Mandurah Line A-series, or maybe even an Airport Line one, if there isn't a weekend shutdown on at the time like it was this year, who knows!

Huge thanks though to ‪@wagrtrains‬ for all the incredible shots taken of the trains at Greenwood, including the thumbnail of the video!

P.S. There may be quite a lot of random, awkward and/or unrelated conversation over the footage of this video, since it is really just the raw footage of the whole journey and not much more, so I didn't want to cut any bits out.

Filmed on: 12/11/2023.

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
02:39 - A-series Arrives!
04:18 - Joondalup - Greenwood
13:31 - Greenwood - Stirling
19:46 - Stirling - Perth
29:02 - Perth - Claremont
38:48 - Claremont - North Fremantle
45:45 - North Fremantle Station (Mandurah Line A-Series Spotted)
51:10 - Conclusion