Ballarat to Melbourne in under an hour

The launch of the #59minuteballarat campaign

The Committee for Ballarat has a long-standing campaign called #59minuteballarat. They've been talking about it for several years, formally launched it in September 2017, and did their utmost to secure commitments from politicians in the leadup to the November 2018 election. Although there are other elements, the thrust of the campaign is to make it so that there's a regularly timetabled train from Ballarat to Melbourne in 59 minutes every morning, and another one in the opposite direction every evening.

A lot of the public commentary goes like "We used to have this, so why can't we have it now!?" The question is of course meant to be rhetorical, but there genuinely are reasons why we can't have it tomorrow - why real investment in infrastructure is necessary to make this happen.

"We used to have it"

Steve Bracks launching the Regional Fast Rail project at Geelong in 2006 (source)

When the Regional Fast Rail project first launched, with its shiny new VLocity trains running at 160 km/h on improved tracks, all the lines had a "flagship" service - one train a day that ran as a super-express, and met the government's travel time commitment. For Ballarat, this was the 59-minute train in the morning peak.

This all happened before my time, so I can't speak from personal experience. But everyone I speak to who does remember those times, tells me how notoriously unreliable this express train was. By all accounts, it almost never actually completed its run in less than an hour. Bear in mind, V/Line considers its commuter trains to be "on time" if they arrive within 5 minutes and 59 seconds of its timetabled arrival, so this train could take 1:05 and still not even be considered "late".

Even sticking to this loose definition of "on time" seems to have been beyond it on most occasions, which isn't surprising - it's not just relying on everything going right on its own run (no train faults, no signal failures, no cars running the gauntlet at level crossings), it's relying on everything going right for all the other trains it has to pass. Which in those days meant Ballarat trains going the other directions, and Metro trains through Sunshine, Footscray, and North Melbourne. So, a lot of things needed to go exactly right for this train to get a clean run - and as anyone who has ridden a train in Victoria will know, that's a big ask.

The train was really driven by politics rather than utility for passengers - the ribbon-cutters wanted a headline that said "Ballarat to Melbourne in under an hour", and they got it. As long as it worked on paper, it didn't matter what happened in the real world.

Over the years, the flagship express trains melted away on all the RFR lines. A minute or two was added to a timetable here; a stop was added at a station there. Slowly they were diluted, to reflect both the reality of how long it took in practice, and to make the service useful to more people. Because the problem with an express train is that it's useless to all the people who live near the stations it passes through - and those people were becoming increasingly important.

A problem of capacity

British trains passing each other in a crossing loop (via Wikipedia)

The big problem with the Ballarat line is that it has a lot of single-track sections where trains can't pass each other. Instead of having two tracks - one in each direction - for the whole way, which allows trains going in opposite directions to pass each other wherever they like, trains on the Ballarat line can only pass each other at specific crossing loops. This means that any timetable needs to very carefully figure out where each train will be at a given time, to allow them to pass each other at the loops. There are a few implications to this:

• it dramatically lowers the capacity of the line, putting a hard limit on the number of trains you can run
• in order to avoid unscheduled delays caused by trains arriving late at a crossing loop, the timetables add a bit of padding in as margin for error, meaning most trains have to stop for a while, adding to journey time
• if there are unexpected delays for one train, it will hold up other trains that were relying on it getting to a particular loop on time

The key unit in this discussion is the "path". A path is a timetabling tool to describe when a train will be where; ie it will leave Ballarat at time X, be at Loop A at time Y, and get to its destination at time Z. These paths rely on each other; another train in the opposite direction will also be at Loop A at time Y, so they can pass each other. If the first train is late getting to Loop A, the second train will need to wait for it.

In a situation where V/Line trains need to pass each other in loops out in the countryside, and then slot precisely between Metro trains when they get to the suburbs, it's common to see trains miss their path into Melbourne - if a Traralgon train doesn't get to Pakenham on time, it can't get in front of the slow Metro stopper, so it has to creep along behind it. And so on.

Paths are easiest to calculate when all trains go the same speed. If I have two trains leaving Ballarat in the morning peak, both going as fast as each other and both stopping at the same stations, they're going to stay roughly the same distance apart. Simple! You can run trains quite frequently based on this principle, all else being equal. But if one train is stopping all stations and the one behind it is an express, the express will eventually catch up to the stopper unless you leave a sizeable gap between them at the start. As a result, an express uses multiple paths - you have to clear way more space on the line for it than a stopper.

This is mostly manageable on proper dual-track lines - if the stopper takes 1h20 and the express takes 59 minutes, you can still launch them about 20 minutes apart without too many headaches. But on a line with a lot of single track, your pathing needs to account for the trains going in the other direction as well. In order to prevent your express from being stuck in a loop, you need to either run very few trains in the opposite direction, or timetable them to get to the crossing loop VERY early, so if they're a bit late it doesn't matter. Or some combination of the two. Which means either infrequent trains or slow trains for people going the other way.

So why can't we have it now? 

Concept image from the Coalition's "European-style" HSR proposal (Vic Coalition, via ABC)

Above all else - capacity.

Top speed isn't really the issue. If you gave the existing 160km/h VLocity trains a clean run - at 3am when the tracks are empty - they could make the journey in about 50 minutes. So the answer is - we could have it now, if we ran it at a time of day when no other trains would get in the way. But since we want to run the express in the peak - when there's the most demand, and the most alternative stopping trains for other passengers to take - we need to increase the capacity of the line.

If we increased the capacity of the line, we could have an express train from Ballarat to Melbourne in under an hour - reliably, and without detracting from stopping or counter-peak trains - using the VLocity trains we have today. We would not need to buy a new fleet of trains, or upgrade existing tracks, or electrify the line - if "under an hour" is what we want, we just need a lot more capacity.

And if we do increase the capacity of the line, it doesn't just make it easier to run these few express trains. As a rising tide lifts all boats, an increase in capacity benefits every train on the line - even the stoppers get a quicker and cleaner run, and are held up less by delays to other trains. Not to mention that an increase in capacity allows you to run trains more often, which can cut your door-to-door journey time by cutting how long you have to wait on the platform for the next train.

Would increasing the top speed be a good idea anyway? The Coalition proposed this at the last election - increasing speeds to 200km/h, with pretty minimal changes to the single/double-track mixture. Labor have pledged a business case for HSR to Ballarat, but (for obvious reasons) we don't really know what form that might take yet - how fast, or how much track duplication it might involve.

It deserves a post of its own, but the short answer is - I'm very skeptical. There's not much point having a train that can do 200km/h if it regularly has to sit at 0km/h in a crossing loop. Or having a train that takes 15 minutes off your journey time, if you still have to sit on the platform waiting 40+ minutes in between trains. Fully duplicating the line, so trains can run more frequently and without impediment - and electrifying the line to Melton so all Ballarat trains can run express through the suburbs - would do the most to improve door-to-door journey times.

So where to from here?

Duplication works on the Ballarat Line Upgrade (source)

To some degree, we wait. After decades of inaction on the issue, we finally have some progress. The Ballarat Line Upgrade project that's currently underway will bring the line from roughly 1/4 dual track to roughly 1/2 dual track - a big increase and a fantastic start. It's due to be completed at the end of 2019, and should see increases in frequency (and hopefully reliability). The government's Western Rail Plan is currently underway, though it's not really clear when the results of this planning work will be announced. It's hard to know precisely what the next steps will be until we know the outcome of this plan - what exactly they plan to do and how soon they plan to do it.

The #59MinuteBallarat campaign by Committee for Ballarat has undoubtedly been effective in drawing political attention to the issue - the BLU and the WRP are due in no small part to their lobbying over the years, and the lobbying of other groups like them. And when attention is what's needed most, it's definitely best to have a nice, simple hook. (And as I hinted at the start, their campaign does have some good detail behind it - it's not just the slogan, they are calling for staged duplication of the line among other things). Full credit to them for what they've done so far - and I know they're not done yet.

But it is really important to have a multi-pronged approach to these issues. Sometimes you need to grab the attention with something simple, and sometimes you need to convey semi-technical details to the general public - to make sure we get something that goes beyond the headlines, and delivers us a service that really works for all of us.