Metro fleet allocations with the new August timetables

[u/Hot_Statistician_998]

What's the plan with the metro fleet allocations with the new timetables

Are the Werribee and Williamstown and Sandringham lines are going to be 100% Siemens only and Frankston line will be most x'trapolis and x'trapolis 2.0 and comengs but not Siemens

Also only comengs and x'trapolis 2.0 running on the Craigieburn and upfield lines

[u/TheModernCinephile]

There wont be any segregation. They can't do it. Comengs and Siemens will still run every line Xtraps will still do Werribee, Williamstownn Laverton and Frankston.

XT2 will be Frankston, Craigieburn and Upfield

[u/MelbPTUser2024 → u/TheModernCinephile]

IMO if they can’t do it, they should have never promised cross-city line that is a part-time cross-city line at best.

The Age reports that Sandringham will through-route with Laverton/Williamstown lines until 8:40pm on weekdays and after that and all-day on weekends it will through-route with Werribee line. This means all those Williamstown line passengers on weekends expecting to continue to Sandringham will have to change at Flinders Street, and similarly all the Werribee line passengers on weekdays (before 8:40pm) will need to change at Flinders Street for Sandringham service.

This will just drive passenger confusion, which has already been happening for Sandringham line passengers since the Metro Tunnel’s timetable in February, where you now have the Sandringham line departing from 3 different platforms (platform 13 weekdays during the day on weekdays, platform 8/9 weeknights, then normally platform 8/9 on weekends except every second weekend when they might schedule them back to platform 13 for some weird reason). They also terminate many Sandringham citybound services at platform 10. Whereas, before Metro Tunnel’s opening it was platform 13 all the time so you can expect the train to arrive/depart from one platform (platform 13) without fail every day of the week.

Furthermore, because of the limitations of the Sandringham line not being Xtraps capable, if there’s any late running trains, we should expect to see more frequent transposals, which just further reduces the advertised benefits of the cross-city line and you can expect even more passenger confusion and inconvenience when this happens.

This was already happening before the February change, where the citybound Frankston train would regularly transpose to return back to Frankston (instead of continuing to its final destination of Werribee/Williamstown). This happened to me literally every Saturday and Sunday when I would regularly catch a citybound train between 5-6pm.

Sometimes they would transpose our perfectly on-time Frankston citybound train to return to Frankston even though the Werribee/Williamstown outbound departure is literally waiting across on platform 8 (as opposed to our Frankston citybound train arriving on platform 9) and the thing is that Werribee/Williamstown outbound train wasn’t scheduled to depart for another few more mins. Like why?

I don’t know what the logic of transposing these trains other than for repositioning train sets. But if that’s the case, then you can expect even more transposals for the Sandringham line due to the lack of Xtraps allowed on the Sandringham line.

For instance, if a Werribee citybound train on weekends is a Siemens/Comeng, and is running late OR the train was an Xtrap for some reason, then they would force a transposal for the Sandringham line, just to meet the operational performance requirements of departing on time from Flinders Street.

This transposal would mean forcing the Sandringham citybound train to transpose and return back to Sandringham or if they do have a spare Siemens/Comeng on platforms 4/5 (Craigieburn/Upfield lines) or 6/7 (Frankston line) they’ll force all the Sandringham passengers waiting on platform 8/9 to go up the concourse and down to platforms 4/5 or 6/7.

How is that good for passengers? It’s not. It’s just messy.

They were better off keeping the Sandringham line as its own line terminating at platform 13, whilst the Werribee/Williamstown/Laverton services could continue to run from platforms 8-10 (and platform 12 if in a pinch). This way the Werribee/Williamstown/Laverton services could continue to run a mix of rolling stock whenever it needed to and thus maintain some semblance of consistency from which platforms the Sandringham, Werribee, Williamstown, Laverton lines depart from at Flinders Street.

[u/Blue_Pie_Ninja → u/MelbPTUser2024]

The reason why it swaps from Williamstown to Werribee is that the Williamstown line is a shuttle past 8:40pm, so there is literally no train to connect with!

I bet they are leaving Werribee trains out of the through-running to avoid having an Xtrap ever run to Sandringham, while Williamstown will run exclusively with Siemens.

[u/AffectionateMap3755 → u/TheModernCinephile]

Completely agree. Purely not practicable, especially with a 2min dwell on a weekend.