Category Archives: Transport

V/Line – Could It Really Be True?

Regular followers of my tweets and blog posts will know that a subject I am, shall we say, “passionate” about is the performance – (or lack thereof) – of the customer service efforts of Victoria’s regional rail provider, V/Line. Any regular commuter with an ounce of common sense understands that things go wrong from time […]

Our Customers Are Idiots: V/Line

Long suffering Geelong V/Line customers copped another penalty for trying to do the right thing and support public transport yesterday morning when the 4:43am service from Marshall to Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station ran out of fuel at Footscray, halting all trains behind it. This included metropolitan services on the Werribee and Williamstown lines, and caused […]

V/Line: The Cleanup Progresses!

If you stopped by my site yesterday, you would have caught a set of images I took onboard my regular 16:37 V/Line service to North Geelong. It was pretty gross. Well, 24 hours on – guess what happened? Same carriage…1207 from V/Locity set VL07…and they’ve attempted to clean it up. I guess they tried at […]

Your Train Is Ready For Boarding!

Boarding my regular 16:37 Southern Cross to North Geelong service this evening, I discovered this in the front most carriage. Nice, isn’t it? Want a closer look? The worst part was that a conductor walked through the carriage, saw the mess, and did nothing about it. This train was NOT ready for boarding. Lift your […]

Fogging Hell!

Having spent most of today in a training session in Werribee – (very handy for a Geelong resident!) – I was rather surprised to emerge and discover the ridiculous fog hanging around. Fog is common in this part of the world at this time of the year…but in the MORNINGS, and not at 5pm in […]

New Timetable Improves Little

The much-hyped new train timetables running in Victoria were heralded by the government, V/Line, and Metro Trains Melbourne as a breakthrough for passengers getting around more efficiently. We were promised by V/Line that “these changes follow several months of work with Metro and feedback from our customers”. Oh really? Customers asked for slower trains? Obviously, […]

V/Line Is A Pain In The Arse!

Now, before I get into this article, I’ll make one thing perfectly clear – this is NOT your typical V/Line rant that I might usually come up with, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll be disappointed. Stick around though, because you will get a laugh at my expense. Over the last three weeks […]

V/Line: Treating Customers Like Idiots – Still

This afternoon I got the following tweet from V/Line’s curiously named “@vlineinform” account, once again showing how the truth should never get in the way of, well, treating their customers like idiots. Now – notice that the current time is “16:37”, and that the tweet(s) were received “3 mins ago” – meaning they were posted […]

Single Point of Failure

Well, yet again this morning, thousands of commuters from the western suburbs of Melbourne and Geelong had their daily travel severely disrupted, after a power failure at Newport station disabled signals and points. Now, I’m the first to accept that unexpected things happen all the time, and that running an integrated public transport network is […]

More V/Line Pointlessness

Doing a quick scan of my Twitter feed last night before snuggling down into bed, I read the following tweet from the “often absent” V/Line “information” account, “@vlineinform”. I mean, what is the bloody point? At 21:29 you “anticipate” that the 21:05 will be 15 minutes late? I mean seriously, what? It either left nine […]