Waiting for Metro: Train services promised for outer-west ‘nowhere in sight’

The Victorian government is being urged to explain when it will deliver the Metro train services to Melbourne’s outer-west it promised four years ago amid concerns public transport investment is falling severely behind the skyrocketing population growth.

A month before his landslide 2018 state election victory, Premier Daniel Andrews pledged to bring electric Metro trains to Melton and Wyndham Vale and flagged possible new stations as part of a “Western Rail Plan”.

Commuters waiting to catch a V/Line train from Tarneit to the CBD on Friday morning. Credit: Eddie Jim

But four years on, there is no construction funding nor a timeline for the upgrades, while residents in some of Australia’s fastest-growing suburbs rely on crowded and infrequent V/Line regional trains to travel to and from the CBD.

Melton mayor Goran Kesic said the council’s discussions with the government suggested upgrades to an electric Metro service were “not on the cards at the moment”.

“Four years after it being a headline election commitment, we are no closer to seeing it happen,” Kesic said. “In 20 years, we’ll be the size of Canberra – it is absolutely essential that the electrification of the Melton line is delivered in the very near future.”

Concern over the western rail upgrades comes amid debate over the government’s pledge to build an underground rail line from Cheltenham to Box Hill in the eastern suburbs.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy has said if he wins the November state election, he will pause the $34.5 billion project, which would form the first section of the proposed Suburban Rail Loop, and redirect funds to health care. Transport experts have also warned that the loop could starve more urgent transport projects of funding.

Saqia Sarwat said she sometimes took an $80 Uber ride to her CBD office because of infrequent trains from her nearest station, in Tarneit. Credit: Eddie Jim

Saqia Sarwat takes the train from Tarneit station – which opened in 2015, 23 kilometres from the city – to her Swanston Street office a few times a week, but the IT professional said infrequent V/Line services meant she sometimes resorted to an $80 Uber ride.

“Sometimes there are only three carriages (instead of six), so we’re squishing in, and some people cannot get in,” she said, while waiting 20 minutes for her rush-hour train on Friday morning. “The population is growing faster than the services here – we need more-frequent trains.”

City of Wyndham mayor Peter Maynard agreed that people in his area were already paying the high social cost of poor public transport access. Around 45 per cent of residents travel outside Wyndham for work including 22 per cent travelling to the CBD.

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“They spend a month a year in their car – it’s a lot of stress on people. The longer we wait it just compounds the issues we face,” he said. Maynard called for the government to commit to a timeline for the Metro upgrade and construction of four new stations earmarked in his area.

An Andrews government spokeswoman could not provide a timeline for the Wyndham and Melton upgrades, nor say when it would complete Western Rail Plan design work backed by $130 million of state and federal funding.

She said the first steps were to upgrade some V/Line trains from six cars to nine – which had started rolling out – and plan the Geelong Fast Rail project. That involved moving trains onto the Werribee line, “directly creating additional capacity and extra services for Melton and Wyndham Vale”.

“We’re delivering the projects we promised – supporting thousands of jobs and delivering more trains, more often,” the spokeswoman said.

A government press release in October 2018 announced the proposed Metro services as part of several projects, including fast trains for Geelong and Ballarat. “Work on the full business case for this overhaul will begin in 2019 in conjunction with the business cases for the Suburban Rail Loop and Airport Rail Link, which only Labor will deliver.” the release said. “The separation of regional and metro services has to occur before fast trains can be delivered, and the full plan is expected to take around a decade to complete.”

John Hearsch, from the Rail Futures Institute, a transport advocacy and research group, said the decision in 2018 to run Melbourne Airport Rail Line trains along shared Metro tracks to Sunshine as part of the new Metro Tunnel project, rather than on a dedicated track, had effectively killed off upgrades to Melton and Wyndham.

“They’ve halved the potential capacity from the Melbourne Metro – that’s the real reason why they’re not going to get an electric train service any time soon,” he said.

Another pair of tracks from the CBD was needed to deliver more trains to the west, Hearsch said, which was why Victoria should prioritise the long-slated Melbourne Metro 2.

Opposition transport spokesman Matt Bach said that unlike the government’s flagship Suburban Rail Loop, the Western Rail Plan was “supported by experts, and stacks up”.

“It’s a really important project, which should finally be progressed,” Bach said. “Residents in Melbourne’s west have been dudded on infrastructure for so long.”

Tarneit and Wyndham Vale quickly became the busiest stations on the V/Line network when they opened in 2015. Tarneit’s population jumped 70 per cent – from 33,600 to 57,453 – in the following five years and is projected to more than double to 131,161 over the next 20 years.

Driven by large-scale housing development, the cities of Wyndham and Melton grew 70 per cent in the decade to 2021 to reach a combined population of almost 480,000. The population of Canberra is 454,000. The two councils predict their combined population will surge to a million by mid-century.

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