Let me take a pause blogging my recent Sydney trip for this:
Proper PDF timetables for Melbourne’s trains are around, but quite hard to find.
Update: see bottom of post.
The standard on-demand generated PDFs found on the Transport Victoria web site are customised to the specific date you ask for (and take into account planned bus replacements and service changes). If you want the “regular” timetable you need to select the date furthest into the future you can find.
It works, but you have to navigate a confusing site, the PDFs are quite difficult to read (and often have errors), and there’s still none available for the cross-city Sunbury to Cranbourne/Pakenham line via the Metro Tunnel.
Luckily, I encountered a poster at a station recently; it has QR code links to all of them. So here they are.
Update: As of Sunday 23/8/2026 these are updated. See bottom of post.
- Alamein
- Belgrave/Lilydale
- Craigieburn/Upfield
- Cranbourne/Pakenham/Sunbury
- Frankston/Stony Point
- Glen Waverley
- Hurstbridge
- Mernda
- Sandringham
- Werribee/Laverton
- Williamstown
Werribee/Laverton and Williamstown appear to be the same PDF, but they go to different URLs, so in the future they might vary.
I am not sure why Craigieburn/Upfield ended up in one PDF (when they only share City stations and North Melbourne) while Hurstbridge/Mernda did not (they share stations out to Clifton Hill).
But no matter, these are much more readable. I really hope they update them with this weekend’s new timetables.
The changes this weekend are good. But part of getting people on board is ensuring they can get all of the information easily.
It’d be great if nicely formatted timetables were available for other routes, including trams and buses. (Occasionally they put out bus PDFs but it’s not a regular thing.)
V/Line has them – why can’t the rest of us?
Update 21/8/2026: Sometime in the last day or so, Transport Victoria has added new versions of the downloadable proper PDFs back to the web site here – scroll down to “Printable metropolitan train timetables”.
They’ve misspelt Belgrave as Belrgave, but it’s good to see the updates.
These links are not the same as those from the QR code links above, so from Sunday 23/8/2026, any posters around the network will need to be replaced, or the links updated.
13 replies on “PDF timetables for Metro”
> I am not sure why Craigieburn/Upfield ended up in one PDF (when they only share City stations and North Melbourne)
Because the plan is for the two lines to meet up again at Craigieburn? Basically, one quadruplicated line between North Melbourne and Craigieburn. That is still the official plan, isn’t it?
Craigieburn and Upfield lines have been sharing the same timetable since the former was the Broadmeadows line at least since days of Bayside Trains, so it’s a carry-over from history for sure. However, I don’t know how the decision was made to combine them in the same booklets in the first place.
The Pakenham / Cranbourne / Sunbury one is so useful when I’m trying to compare a Frankston line train at McKinnon connecting with a V/Line service at Southern Cross, to a Metro Tunnel service at Carnegie connecting with the same service at Footscray. When I was looking at this yesterday I had to have 4 timetables open – Frankston, V/Line Bendigo, Cranbourne, and Sunbury, so I could find the Sunbury service leaving Town Hall at the time the Pakenham or Cranbourne service was scheduled to arrive, and see when that service arrived at Footscray.
Looking forward to a combined Cross-City timetable so we can find direct services to Off The Pier Fish & Chips in Williamstown.
These have been available online since before the last timetable change on 1 February, and you’ve waited until now, with only three days of their operation left, to share them? Seems a little strange. You may as well have waited until the new ones start on Sunday.
Also, Craigieburn and Upfield have been grouped together in booklet timetables for decades.
Tramologist is correct, the Craigieburn & Upfield booklets were combined back in December 1998 when the Upfield Line was upgraded to full time.
Before that, they used to have the standalone timetable for Upfield had evening & Sunday timetables for 19 tram & 319/320 bus to Upfield/Craigieburn.
Handy for people who live between the two in suburbs like Hadfield. Save those passengers carrying two booklets plus paying the then 20c price twice.
@User, it’s theoretically the plan, based on a decade old document and no funding… so will it ever happen? Who knows.
@Flanders, the links to these PDFs aren’t anywhere that I can find on the Transport Victoria web site. I only recently found the poster at a station – one specific station – I haven’t seen the QR codes widely distributed.
So yes it’s late to be posting. Better late than never perhaps, but the point is they should make them more widely available/visible.
Journey Planner PDFs are a nice standard format, but they suffer so badly from inaccurate data. Apparently from next week the 16:36 down Lilydale doesn’t run anymore, bulltish.
PDF timetables are available on Metro’s website (Timetables, select line, select any date of new timetable, download. Zip file contains all master timetable data), although the format is poor.
@daniel – there was a link from here – https://transport.vic.gov.au/timetables – which originally went to the summary page for the 1st February “Big Switch” changes. The PDFs for V/Line were also uploaded from here (same format as the V/Line website PDFs)
But the Frankston PDF was never added in May once the Mordy works ended, only accessible from the station posters.
This ‘More Ways to Move’ landing page now has been updated with the 23 August summary information, with the new PDFs are still pending
@Gareth, the current state (as of 20/8/2026) of the on-demand PDF timetables is a case in point.
The 21st-27th August download shows the 4:36pm down to Lilydale.
The 28th August to 31st December download (normally the one to go for) doesn’t show the 4:36 train – but does show most stations incorrectly listed twice. In the case of Ringwood it’s shown five times!
Screen grab here: https://bsky.app/profile/danielbowen.au/post/3mtjaq65g6c2u
@Craig, thanks, I knew I’d seen them somewhere. It’s a mystery to me why they don’t put them on the timetables page, and why the bus ones that show up from time to time aren’t made universally available.
The new PDF booklets for Metro Trains are now available at https://transport.vic.gov.au/timetables
(The wording suggests regional timetables too but these are not available)
The Sandringham Line is now conveniently combined with Werribee/Williamstown as one “Bayside Line” timetable, making it easy to see which trains continue through Flinders St, bar any transposals (maybe less common than in the Frankston Cross-City era due to Sandringham’s shorter length & fleet constraints where the X’Trapolis sets can go, i.e. not to Sandringham).
Also, for Gareth, the 16:36 Lilydale express is on these!
They have also uploaded one page tram route guides linked from here, although there are few accessible stops are missing. These used to be made available in a grouped fold-out pamphlet on trams until Covid (& DL leaflets by route prior to that until about 2017).
Before anyone sends brickbats to them about the footnote for Route 59 stating no low floor trams, until there is more than one tram in use and it runs daily, it’s arguably better than to imply none for them than for a regular passenger to wait in vein on Elizabeth St for a G class to arrive. But there are some level access stops on Matthews Ave not marked.
Unfortunately, the equivalent rail line maps are not available on the same page at this stage. The February editions are however still burried away on the Metro Trains website – http://www.metrotrains.com.au/maps/
There’s also separate interactive line maps here – http://www.metrotrains.com.au/lines/
I have seen an updated Frankston Line poster this week with a bus connection icon now shown at Mordialloc. Hopefully they have fixed other errors inculding the zones on the Glen Waverley Line & Rushall incorrectly being marked as a premium station.
Still waiting for any bus route equivalents to appear, especially since the individual route maps got removed in the backward 2018-2019 website refresh
They are still available ad-hoc in other places, inculding the large Regional Fares Manual Supplement – https://transport.vic.gov.au/tickets-and-myki/fares/regional-bus-fares
Without detracting from the importance of PDF timetables, most people these days (including the ‘marginal’ users whom you’d hope convert to it!) rely on a maps app. It seems they’re only getting worse.
I was quite close to the Campbell Arcade entry to Flinders St station the other day. Google maps insisted I need to take a roundabout route it estimated at 13 mins to get to the station, so it instead recommended a far slower tram journey. The PTV app is a bit better, but most people aren’t going to be using it.
The new Werribee/Sandringham timetable shows which trains continue through Flinders St, but also highlights the same old issue that has plagued Flinders St through trains for years – dwell times. It’s effectively not a cross-city line at all. The dwell times at Flinders St range from 2-9 minutes, with the off-peak services typically 3 minutes.
The Metro Tunnel also has dwell time issues. It seems very common to sit for 1-2 minutes at Town Hall, State Library and Arden just for the timetable to catch up, all in the same trip. Even Footscray and Malvern get the treatment. I have seen a full peak hour train wait for 3 minutes at Malvern one afternoon before departing for Caulfield. It makes a mockery of the new fancy semi-automated driving, in-cab signalling and turn-up-and-go frequencies.
If they removed the padding in the timetable they could save up to 5 minutes through the tunnel. Padding belongs at the end of the line, not the middle of the journey.
The long dwell times at Flinders Street, and the bottleneck that is Flinders Street Station itself (so much for the old Metro Tunnel propaganda posters), will probably still be there when we’re dead and buried.
All PTV did with Flinders Street post Metro Tunnel opening was replace Dandenong trains on platforms 6 and 7 with Traralgon and swap Frankston cross-city trains with Sandringham, rendering platform 13 useless.
Platform 1: Mernda and Hurstbridge services completely unchanged
Platforms 2+3: Belgrave, Lilydale, Ringwood and Glen Waverley services (also Alamein via loop after midday, and the odd Mernda/Hurstbridge if platform 1 isn’t available and platform 2 is somehow empty)
Platform 4: No Sunbury trains means more Blackburn and Alamein loop-skippers in peak instead of being forced to share platform 3 (not that it matters as 2+3 are still massively overused between 3 and 7PM)
Platform 5: No Sunbury trains means more Craigieburn/Upfield… oh wait, never mind, here’s a couple more evening services (at least they were nice enough for that says Burnley and Clifton Hill group users waiting 30 minutes after missing their train)
Platform 6: Frankston trains replaced Dandenong
Platform 7: Used almost exclusively for up Traralgon services every 40 minutes, sometimes Frankston
Platforms 8+9: Sandringham/Werribee/Williamstown trains, sometimes Frankston
Platform 10: Laverton services via Altona loop when Werribee expresses are running
Platform 12: Went from barely used to terminating up Sandringham trains when platform 10 is occupied
Platform 13: The new platform 11
In other words, they basically made platforms 7 and 13 redundant (repeating the exact same mistakes of late last century with platform 11 and Princes Bridge 14/15/16) while leaving the true bottleneck that comprises of platforms 1-5 untouched and not even thinking of straightening out the elderly low-speed jointed spaghetti track between Richmond and Southern Cross that every Frankston line passenger has to endure while Burnley group trains race past at line speed on equally-decrepit track but without all the sharp turns.