{"id":7005,"date":"2012-12-06T20:34:03","date_gmt":"2012-12-06T09:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelwyres.com\/?p=7005"},"modified":"2012-12-06T20:34:03","modified_gmt":"2012-12-06T09:34:03","slug":"no-more-seven-car-geelong-vlocity-trains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/2012\/12\/no-more-seven-car-geelong-vlocity-trains\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Seven Car Geelong V\/Locity Trains?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While the recent announcement of the addition of 40 new carriages to the V\/Line<\/a> fleet is welcome after years of overcrowding, particularly on the Geelong and Ballarat lines, I believe that an important point has been missed.<\/p>\n

\n\n \n
State Government To Buy 40 New V\/Line Carriages<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/center>\n<\/p>\n

“Mr Mulder said today the Government would spent about $207 million on 40 carriages. The carriages equate to seven three-carriage trains. The remaining 19 carriages will be used to bump existing two-car trains up to three.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

This is interesting because in November 2008, the “flagship” services between Melbourne and Geelong were upgraded from six carriages to seven carriages<\/a>. This was achieved by coupling a three-car set with a pair of two-car sets to provide seven carriages.<\/p>\n

The single platforms at South Geelong and Marshall, and both of platforms five and six at North Melbourne were extended to cater for the increased length of the consists.<\/p>\n

Except there won’t be any two-car V’Locity<\/a> sets left after this order is completed. So consists can only be in multiples of three carriages.<\/p>\n

Three, six or nine.<\/p>\n

We won’t see nine, as the platforms aren’t long enough – so the longest V’Locity consists we will see are six<\/i> carriages long.<\/p>\n

The money specifically spent extending the platforms to host seven carriages has effectively been wasted.<\/p>\n

Now, it could be argued that the additional seven V’Locity sets will allow more trains to be run to cover the drop in carriages numbers making individual services – and that yet may happen.<\/p>\n

That would certainly be welcome.<\/p>\n

However, the government has not yet committed to the increase of services<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“A V\/Line spokeswoman said the Baillieu government had not yet accepted its proposal to run off-peak Melbourne-Geelong trains every 20 minutes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bottom line is, even if the number of operating services increases to compensate for the loss of carriages – (and therefore seats) – on individual services, the loss of two-carriage V’Locity sets also decreases the flexibility of the fleet.<\/p>\n

Two-carriage consists, and five-carriage consists will also no longer be possible.<\/p>\n

It means that services that might previously have run with a single two-carriage set will now have to run with three-carriages – which will increase fuel usage by 50% for those services.<\/p>\n

Previous five-carriage services either have to decrease to three carriages – (a service reduction) – or increase to six carriages – (extra fuel usage) – to operate.<\/p>\n

This just doesn’t seem all that well thought out.<\/p>\n

If they went for 42 new carriages instead of 40, we could have 14 more three-carriage sets – (instead of just seven) – and we could maintain the flexibility of having two-car sets in the fleet.<\/p>\n

They could also run even more extra services, because instead of 58 V\/Locity sets they will end up with after this new order, they would have 65 sets.<\/p>\n

Extra carriages are great – (and welcome) – but every silver lining has its very own grey cloud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the recent announcement of the addition of 40 new carriages to the V\/Line fleet is welcome after years of overcrowding, particularly on the Geelong and Ballarat lines, I believe that an important point has been missed. State Government To Buy 40 New V\/Line Carriages “Mr Mulder said today the Government would spent about $207 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[249,503,572,573],"class_list":["post-7005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transport","tag-geelong","tag-springst","tag-vline","tag-vlocity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}