This is what weâve been waiting for for some time. This week the State Government finally revealed some of the train service upgrades that will accompany the Metro Tunnel.
As part of the same announcement, they also announced the next steps in the Sunshine station redevelopment, but I really wanted to focus on the timetable changes here.
Context: The Metro tunnel will connect the Cranbourne/Pakenham line with the Sunbury line, freeing up space in their Loop tunnels.
- the Frankston line will move to the Caulfield Loop tunnel
- the Sandringham line will link through to Werribee/Williamstown
So what’s the upgrade? First the relatively small stuff:
- Werribee line gets some extra peak hour services, to align it better with the Sandringham line frequency
- Craigieburn also gets some shoulder-peak services
- Seymour line will get some additional peak services, boosting capacity
- Bendigo line will get more six car trains on weekends, helping to relieve crowding
- Traralgon line will go from every 60 to every 40 minutes on weekdays between the peaks, cutting waiting times and providing more travel options
The biggest changes are for the Sandringham, Craigieburn and Upfield lines. Here’s a summary of their frequencies, and the changes:
| Time period | Sandringham | Craigieburn | Upfield |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekday peak | 7-8 | 6-10 | 15-20 |
| Weekday interpeak | 20 | 20 | |
| Weekday evening | 20 | ||
| Saturday | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| Saturday evening | 20 | ||
| Sunday morning | 40 | ||
| Sunday daytime | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| Sunday evening | 20 |
These Craigieburn and Upfield line changes are important because they vastly improve the wait times in the evenings and on Sunday mornings from every 30 to 40 minutes down to every 20 minutes.
Hopefully they align the two services to provide a consistent 10 minute frequency through the Northern Loop. (No mention at this stage of removing the weekday daytime Loop reversal to make the direction consistent.)
The Sandringham line weekday change to 10 minutes is logical because they need to match trains connecting through from the Werribee and Williamstown lines.
But unbelievably, they are not fixing the awful 40 minute gaps on the Sandringham line on Sunday mornings. This is incredibly disappointing, given it’s only 4 extra services each way to plug those gaps and align with the newly connected Werribee line service.
Having every second train terminate at Flinders Street during that period compromises the usefulness and legibility of the new cross-city line.
You may have noticed that the 40 minute gaps have been a key focus of the PTUA recently, as well as others such as the More Trains For Melbourne’s North campaign.
(It’s amazing how on Facebook, a small band of people will fiercely defend indefensible 40 minute frequency suburban trains, and repeatedly claim that everybody should live their lives by railway timetables.)
The naysayers are wrong. It’s great that the politicians are, at least partially, acting on this.
Fixing long waits between trains is vital. It makes it far easier to use those lines at those times, especially if making connections. And patronage and travel demand has changed and is no longer focused on the traditional commuter peaks. There is more travel on the weekends and in the evenings.
Long waits put people off using the service like almost nothing else. Some people still avoid trains on Sundays because they think they still only run every 40 minutes. They’re not wrong. The same goes for 30 minute evening frequencies.
The announced changes also seem to fit into the long term transition to aligning most suburban services to a frequency of mostly every 10 or 20 minutes (and V/Line to mostly every 20 or 40).
Assuming the Metro tunnel itself also results in big service increases for the Sunbury, Cranbourne and Pakenham lines, this means that more of the network will be running at 20 minutes or better at all times (apart from overnight on weekends, when the hourly Night Network runs).
Every 20 minutes is not as good as every 10, obviously. It’s not Turn Up And Go. They haven’t yet twigged that frequency is just as much about attracting passengers as it is adding capacity.
What about other lines?
This package doesnât even solve all the problems of infrequent services, eg gaps of over 20 minutes. Apart from Sandringham’s lopsided timetable, the Mernda and Hurstbridge lines will be the other two that remain with 40 minute frequencies on Sunday mornings
Mernda and Hurstbridge as well as the Belgrave, Lilydale, Alamein and Glen Waverley lines still have 30 minute frequencies in the evenings, despite huge travel demand.
The period before 8am on Sundays is also a problem, with mostly hourly services on all lines.
Elsewhere around the network, V/Line’s Geelong and Ballarat lines have recently had some good upgrades.
Some tram routes have had incremental upgrades recently, though evening 20-30 minute frequencies still need attention.
A few bus routes have been added or tweaked too, but most buses remain sorely lacking for good useable timetables.
Still, this is progress.
Despite our population being on par with Sydney’s, we’re still some way off reaching Sydney’s level of service, which provides trains every 15 minutes to most stations from first to last service.
But cutting waiting times like like this really does make the train system more usable for more trips, and will get more people using it.
Hopefully this is a taste of things to come. Melbourne has a lot of catching up to do.
Updates: Minor errors corrected. Thanks Z and P.
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17 replies on “At last, more services”
You don’t know that they’re not fixing the Sandy line Sunday mornings. Have a think about it. It will feed into the Werribee line which already runs a 20 minute service. Therefore Sandringham will as well. Four trains is simply not worth mentioning when covering the interpeak upgrade is far more important. Remember, it was a dot point announcement, not a detailled one.
There’s sadly nothing to fix 30 min interpeak trains past Ringwood. And no upgrade to 30 min Sunday morning and weekend evening trains on the Belgrave/Lilydale, Alamein & Glen Waverley Lines
These can be improved to 20 mins without any duplication work (as already occurs on Saturdays and Sunday daytime)
Major centres of Glenferrie, Camberwell, Box Hill and Ringwood deserve better, especially with the government’s housing density targets.
On trams about half the routes still run every 30 mins before 10am Sundays too…plus some late starts such as the first outbound 70 past Melbourne Park and down Swan St around 8:30am on a Sunday.
40 min weekend trains to Traralgon were promised as part of the regional fare cap promise (as were hourly weekend Seymour trains), hopefully still on their way – https://www.julianaaddison.com.au/media-releases/cheaper-fares-more-trains-extra-services-for-the-regions/
I’ve always been curious how railway systems grow a timetable … do they assume some completely empty state for the network, all trains stabled in various yards and then … simulate movements until they get the frequency they want? or do they take the existing timetable and shuffle stuff about until something shakes out that fixes the obvious flaws? can anyone recommend something to read on this?
@Flanders St, I specifically asked the government if they were changing Sandringham on Sundays, and waited for them to check before publishing. They said No.
I’d love to be proven wrong, as it doesn’t make any sense.
Are they training enough drivers to cover this? Or will the new services end up getting cancelled for lack of available drivers?
At last, a breakthough. I’m amused to read that you have “enthusiasts” still arguing to keep things the way they are. We have them in Sydney too, engaged in a perpetual rearguard action against the metro. Hopefully, as happened in Sydney with the metro, you will get a positive response and substantial patronage increase from the greater frequency. It really is a key to increasing patronage, together with journey time and reliability.
Farcical that a journey as basic as South Yarra – direct* to Flinders St on a Sunday until mid-morning will only be possible every 40 minutes, and then, arguably worse, only every 20 minutes until the last service of the night. Has nobody realised / does nobody care that with Dandenong services completely bypassing South Yarra station, other lines have to pick up the slack to make journeys practical? Currently on a weekend in the middle of the day, there are 9 services direct South Yarra – Flinders St (6 ex-Frankston, 3 ex-Sandringham), this will drop to 3 if nothing changes from current plans.
*Assuming Frankston trains will run anti-clockwise around the loop as Dandenong trains currently do
I would think Upfield should be getting more services at peak. WIth only Craigieburn and Upfield sharing the northern loop tunnel, they could each go every 10 minutes, giving a 5 minute interval in the city loop.
And the 40 minute ways on Sunday mornings are definitely horrible. If someone have to rely on these frequencies to get to a Sunday morning shift job, it’ll take a cancelled train to really ruin their morning, and may lose their jobs or a chunk of their earnings to make up by taking some taxi or rideshare service.
@Nick and that south yarra 58 tram only goes along William Street, which imo is the edge of the city
What’s ridiculous is they can easily run more off-peak services for ALL lines without additional infrastructure, including those that aren’t directly affected by Metro 1 tunnel’s opening.
The budget for the upgraded timetables is miniscule compared to new infrastructure. We’re simply not getting the most out of the rail infrastructure we already have.
Fantastic news, looking forward to more improvements too, and bus and tram timetables will hopefully be aligned too. When are the new timetables likely to start?
@Adz. Yes, the government needs to spend on service growth alongside new infrastructure. This is what was done in NSW the last decade and patronage rose enormously (pre covid) as a result and it has largely recovered and growing again since.
Good news for a few lines, some seem not to have been improved though. Frankston still takes a really long time to the city (jumping to a Cranbourne city bound train at caulfield makes it much faster).
I have to wonder — what was the net effect of running times for each train route, from all the level crossing removals so far? Of course many still in progress, but there should be some big time savings from that.
Great to see these extra services added. Eliminating wait times over 20 minutes on the metro network can’t come soon enough.
Question: Will the Werribee trains that don’t run through to Sandringham definitely terminate at Flinders Street, or is it possible they’ll terminate at South Yarra or Richmond? I feel like it would make sense to at least run them to South Yarra.
Sunday timetables shouldn’t exist in Victoria period, they became obsolete three decades ago when Sunday trading began.
That said, I’d rather see Night Network extended to public holidays and eventually 7 nights a week by the end of this decade. A 40-minute wait is way better than choosing between a five hour wait or a $120 taxi/Uber fare and/or surge pricing. Can’t even waste time sitting around at the pokies anymore as the government forced all the venues (except Crown, yuck) to close at 4AM, long before the first train, and longer still for the first tram or bus.
@Brian, there’s been a steady increase in driver numbers over the years. Some hiccups along the way, but as I understand it there’s been a lot of recruitment in preparation for the Metro tunnel.
@Matt, the Guardian article suggested some changes would be before or after the Metro tunnel opens, though they’re all connected with it indirectly… so I can’t see anything happening beforehand.
When will that be? I suspect late in the year, Nov or Dec.
@Rick, there’s currently no way of terminating trains at South Yarra or Richmond.