For 90% of my transport needs, I rely on a very small stretch of railway: the track running over the Harbour Bridge between Milson's Point and Wynyard stations, a single stop. Exasperated last night by the fact that once again there were no trains running over the bridge and I was forced to catch a bus instead, I decided to find out what the schedule was for such outages in the near future.

This is what I found. The following dates are Cityrail's projection for when that one small piece of track will be unavailable over the next six months:

January 3-4, 13-14 (weekend), 16-18, 22-24, 29-1st February
February 12-15, 19-22, 26-1st March
March 19-22
April 2-4, 21-22 (weekend), 23, 26
May 7-10, 21-24
June 4-7, 9-11 (long weekend) 12-14, 18-21
July 2, 4-5, 9, 10, 12, 16-19, 21-22 (weekend)

(All dates denote days on which the line is unavailable after 10pm, except those marked weekend where the line is closed all day for the entire weekend)

You could argue that this is just an unlucky six months for me, and some big work is going on. And I'm sure that if I complained to Cityrail that's exactly what they'd do. But this is pretty typical of the regularity of outages I've experienced since moving to the North Shore, so whatever is going on, it's been going on for three years now.