Article: Fast rail flop: country trains reliably late

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From the Sunday Age click here!

Fast rail flop: country trains reliably late

Fast rail flop: country trains reliably late

    * Reid Sexton
    * January 25, 2009

COUNTRY trains in Victoria have not met one monthly performance target in the past five years, after again falling below the benchmark every month in 2008.

V/Line's punctuality problems have caused havoc for tens of thousands of passengers who use the regional service, which last financial year recorded just over 11 million passenger trips on rail. This is despite the Government spending $750 million on its controversial regional fast rail service and its promise to improve travel times for commuters.

Last year, 15 per cent of all V/Line services were late, almost double the number needed to reach the performance target.

V/Line only counts trains as late when they are delayed by more than six minutes for short-haul and 11 minutes for long-haul. Its inability to meet the target last month was the 61st consecutive month it had failed to do so.

In its annual report, V/Line says additional services to cope with booming patronage, which has almost doubled in three years, have increased congestion and delays on the system.

It adds that an increase in services by Connex ? with which it shares track space in metropolitan areas ? has put a strain on the network.

But in its December performance report, V/Line claims staff error is partly to blame. A spokesman said that was most likely to be due to drivers not parking trains in the yards properly.

Among the worst-performing lines in 2008 were Geelong and Traralgon, which recorded reliability of 83.6 per cent and 83.3 per cent respectively. Both lines, along with Bendigo and Ballarat, were part of the regional fast rail upgrade promised in 1999.

That project ran about $670 million over budget and, after private funding fell through, forced the Labor government to reduce the promised cuts in travel time by four minutes on every line but Geelong.

Opposition transport spokesman Terry Mulder estimated the real fast rail cost at $919 million and said it had been a waste of taxpayers' money because passengers could still not rely on the network.

"Several times over the past week trains were cancelled, with people shuffled onto buses and into taxis because of heat restrictions on the lines," he said.

"People in regional Victoria want a clean, reliable and safe rail service, and regional fast rail hasn't provided that. It gets back to their poor prioritisation in terms of where rail infrastructure should be spent. They should have invested in getting service reliability to a decent level, but instead they've invested in myki and fast trains."

Mr Mulder said the Government had done little to separate V/Line and Connex services, leaving the reliability of regional services at the mercy of suburban patronage growth.

A spokeswoman said V/Line regularly met reliability targets in the regional network, but "substantial congestion" near Melbourne delayed services near the city. V/Line's punctuality target of 92 per cent was the most stringent for a regional operator in the world, she said, but declined to say whether it was too high.

A spokesman for Transport Minister Lynne Kosky said more benefits would be delivered under the Government's $38 billion transport plan.