The Ballarat Line evening crunch

The Ballarat line has seen quite a bit of investment in recent years - building the infrastructure to increase capacity, and running more services to take advantage of that capacity. But there are still big holes in the timetable that I want to highlight, and which should be relatively cheap and easy to fix. 

First, a bit of a crash-course in the way the Ballarat line's timetable works. 

Mid-weekday, there are full-length services to and from Ballarat every 40 minutes, PLUS short-run services to and from Melton(1) every 40 minutes. They all stop at all stations, so the suburban stations get a combined 20 minute frequency. 

In peak times, Ballarat services are doubled to every 20 minutes, as are the Melton services. Both services skip alternating stations, so the suburban stations don't get the same kind of combined frequency - but it helps balance the passenger numbers.

At all other times - early mornings, evenings, weekends - it's just the full-length Ballarat services, with no(2) short-run services supplementing them. These start at every 40 minutes on weekday evenings, tapering off to hourly; they're hourly all day on weekends. 

At peak hours and midday weekdays, this represents a big improvement compared to a few years ago - but the evenings and weekends have not seen the same kind of investment. 

Let's get weekends out of the way first. 

Right now, weekends just have a single hourly train to Ballarat per hour (no extra Melton services). 

This is manifestly inadequate, but it will be changing soon - at the last election, the government pledged to increase weekend frequencies to every 40 minutes, and rumour has it, this will happen in early 2025. 

As far as I know, this is just a 40 minute frequency to Ballarat, without the supplementary Melton services we see on weekdays. Will this be enough? We'll see, I guess. 

But the focus of this post is weekday evenings. 

Even just looking at the number of services, it's clear there's a big cliff immediately after the evening peak. From 4pm to 5:59 there are 6 trains per hour leaving Southern Cross. From 6:00-6:59, it's 4 trains per hour. But from 7:00-7:59 there's just one train per hour. 

This is partly because a 40 minute frequency doesn't divide evenly into an hourly number (there are two trains from 8:00-8:59) but there's no denying the service frequency drops off severely in this "shoulder peak" time, when lots of people are still wanting to travel. 

Services per hour (Weekday, towards Ballarat)

But the other consideration here is the number of carriages per service. (3)

Services on the Ballarat Line are all operated by 3-car VLocity sets, either as a lone set of 3 or coupled into a set of 6(4). Ostensibly this is done to match passenger demand, but in practice, that isn't always the case. 

Every service after 7pm is scheduled as a 3-car service. As a result, from 5pm to 7pm the number of services per hour drops from 6 to 1, but the number of carriages per hour drops from 36 to 3. 

Carriages per hour (Weekday, towards Ballarat)

And let me tell you, this is noticeable. It's real sardine stuff, even on a random Tuesday when there's nothing in particular bringing crowds to the city. 

Someone who lives in Rockbank or Melton might feel differently, but for me as someone who commutes from Ballarat, the peak hour service levels are basically(5) coping at the moment. 

But if I hang around a bit after work - if I stay for after-work drinks or dinner or shopping - the experience is infinitely worse. From 7 to 9pm, the trains are all absolutely packed till Melton - and yet they're all scheduled with 3 cars. 

There is a real need to invest in infrastructure on the Ballarat line. The peaks cope okay now, but population growth will overtake that pretty soon. We need the line to Melton electrified, and express tracks for V/Line, ASAP - and we'll need sections further down the Ballarat line duplicated fairly soon after. 

But this "shoulder peak" crowding is an issue that could be solved quickly - without needing new infrastructure. 

Just running the existing timetable, but with extra carriages, would be a cheap and easy fix that would make passengers' lives infinitely more comfortable.

Footnotes: 

1. Some of these, notably in peak hours, originate or terminate at Bacchus Marsh instead of Melton. 

2. Ok there is literally one short-run service from Bacchus Marsh on Saturday mornings, but this is the only service that breaks this basic pattern. 

3. Information on the number of carriages scheduled for a given train has been obtained from V/Line's Working Timetable. I conducted this analysis based on the version that went into effect on 15/09/2024, and then a new version (reflecting the 1 December timetable change) was uploaded while I was drafting the post. However I've had a quick look and it looks like nothing's changed on the key services I highlight in the post. 

4. There are plans to run some short-run Melton services as sets of 9, but this requires platforms to be lengthened so won't happen for a few years.

5. They basically cope ok when services run as scheduled, anyway. It's far too common for a peak hour train that's scheduled for 6 cars to actually only run with 3, or for trains to be cancelled entirely - at which point things become unmanageably crowded. This is a maintenance issue V/Line urgently needs to address - but that's another post.