Improved train service from Orange to Sydney 'is common sense'

May I give your readers a bit of history regarding passenger services from Orange and Bathurst.

I was appointed guard at Orange and Bathurst and I took promotion to assistant station master at Blayney.

All my career I have work in western NSW, firstly as a porter then shunter guard and assistant station master, before becoming 3rd class home station at Blayney.

Bathurst had 12 guards and we worked the Bathurst day-return service to Sydney and returned on a Friday evening. The train left for Bathurst and then extended to Blayney and Orange.

On a Friday, the train to Orange was all stations, it was a popular service.

At Lithgow passengers joined the Mudgee day-return service giving Mudgee line passengers a day in Sydney for business, doctors and recreation.

I full support the Orange Rail Action Group in their fight for better services.

It is common sense to run the train from Orange, villages and towns - like Millthorpe and Blayney - could access the train.

If the state government had the guts they would repair stations like Newbridge, which is on the heritage register under Blayney Shire Council, so people could use their railway station.

We, the people not the bureaucracy, own this vital piece of infrastructure.

In finishing, there has been a precedent on a Monday morning and Friday night to have had a service from Sydney.

I'm sure that I'm not the only retired teacher who has noticed that many children of all ages, hold their pencils or biros in strange ways.

The photos and television footage, usually show students holding their biro or pencil as if it was a broom handle.

I'm sure I saw a recent news item and photo where older students were being taught handwriting in small groups.

However, their grip on biros was exactly the same ... a broom handle grip!

It seems that good handwriting may well be a thing of the past.

Now to a very slight change of topic: Margaret Atwood's thoughts on writing as a creative activity are summed up as: "Writing is an act of faith; I believe it's also an act of hope that things can be better than they are."

Peter Dutton will announce his nuclear power plan before the 2025 election.

That's good. People need to know where these large-scale reactors and the waste would go, how we source the enriched fuel, how much they cost etc.

But more importantly, whether we have time.

Former chief scientist Alan Finkel said we might be able to do it by the 2040s but by then nuclear power in Australia "won't be needed" because we'd be operating with renewables, batteries and gas backup ... existing and far cheaper technologies.

Mr Dutton and his climate change and energy spokesman Ted O'Brien have said large-scale reactors will replace coal-fired power stations, but have they asked the people who live there who have had to put up with the health risks and pollution of coal for decades?

And the so-called small modular reactors, not yet up and running anywhere, are likely to be placed in regional areas.

They would need extensive community consultation, and transmission lines.

Furthermore, there's the nuclear waste problem.

Despite having nuclear power for over 60 years, the US has been unable to agree on the location of a site for the storage of high-level nuclear waste from its reactors.

Its 85,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel was initially stored in steel-lined concrete pools surrounded by water and is now in ageing storage casks.

What is the Coalition's radioactive waste plan, what will it cost and where will the waste be stored? It will be an interesting read.