Rumours abound that Melbourne’s railway to Melton will not be electrified – despite that it has been foreshadowed for many years and other recent improvements to the line such as duplication and extra and upgraded stations.
And despite that not electrifying will mean a future of using trains as long as 9 cars, all running their own Diesel engines. At first glance it is hard to see anything good about an intensive rail service using so much diesel power and fuel.
And it would appear the sole reason for rejecting electrification is only because of the cost of the fixed infrastructure – poles, wires, signalling changes, and potentially some new trains and stabling sidings.
It is not clear whether the decision would be also based on any other government projects being ‘front end loaded’ into the electrification extension. This could include:
- any remaining level crossing removals along the route (and there are a few)
- a new station for Melton (which would not be strictly necessary and was definitely not a thing in previous decades)
- and any changes elsewhere on the system which don’t directly relate to the extension per se, but are seen as necessary and consequential for example in the CBD, or at Sunshine, or even on lines on the far side of the system that the government may want to ‘through-route’ trains to.
The front-end loading, if it exists, would be rationalised by an increase in services consequent on the electrification but not directly caused by it. It is one of those situations where the “Do Nothing” option is wrongly described, as the diesel service creeps incrementally to a similar level it might have been, and also requires other expenditure elsewhere on the system, such as more platform capacity at Southern Cross for all these terminating trains.
How did we get to here?
Electrification used to be a cause for joyous commemoration – for example – electric trains arriving in Newcastle in 1984 was a cause for citywide fireworks.
It was always a source of pride in improvement in the rail system, even when some of what else was fundamentally wrong was not being addressed concurrently. In the Newcastle example, plenty of old, run down or otherwise inadequate stations en route were not improved at that point.
It reflects that electrification can be all of the following: a stimulant to other necessary change; otherwise irrelevant to the pace of change; or even a rescue project that saves a line that was otherwise going to close (for example, the Richmond line in Sydney).
Sometimes it is justified by other factors, for example, the Glenlee Colliery in NSW caused the extension of electric trains to Campbelltown (not a foregone conclusion otherwise); a more intensive and electric service to Gympie and Nambour off the freight electrification to Rockhampton, and the availability of the electric wire to Pippita, Sydney, not always used but assisting with a limited industrial service from Lidcombe.
Notwithstanding any of the above, governments always trumpeted the arrival of electrification as a benefit to their passengers.
Melbourne and Victoria have a particular problem with electrification that was emerging in the 1970s and was here in full force with the Sunbury extension, and that is the perceived LOSS of service quality with electrification, to the point that locals advocate against it.
This is also possibly what might have weighed on decision-makers’ minds with Melton, in a similar though not identical situation.
Let’s look at this history of electrification in Melbourne and Victoria. The following earlier posts can help with some of the issues that will be posted here:
Operation Phoenix and the Victorian Railways after WWII Part 2 – Opportunities wasted – looking at the post-war Gippsland electrification and its ultimate failure
The last leaves of autumn to the first shoots of spring: Victorian Railways under Bolte, Hamer and Thompson – Short reference to the Werribee electrification
Jeffed: Appraising Kennett’s rail record – Short reference to electrifying the Leongatha line as far as Cranbourne.
Melbourne’s original electrification started in the 1910s after the Merz Report, based on growing suburban rail traffic at that time entirely served by steam locomotives, mostly tank locos, with all the expected problems of crewing, maintenance, fuel and time wasted “running around” and the trains were slower than the system demanded.
Electric trains delivered in every respect – fewer crew, faster, less maintenance, no fuel (at least on the train) and no need to run around. And the sets had faster acceleration due to power being distributed across the sets.
Melbourne’s rollout penetrated further into the surrounding bush suburbs than the concurrent project in Sydney. Places like Ferntree Gully, Lilydale and Hurstbridge were well beyond the urban limit on minor branch lines.
Thus it could be said, improved times and frequencies were the selling point for passengers, in addition to the benefits mentioned previously, which accrued to the railways. And when the trains were first rolled out in the 1920s, there was no appreciable difference in the on-board comfort and appointments from the steam country lines they replaced.
Apart from a small fleet (and largely token) of underpowered electric locomotives, the focus was on passenger traffic, and unlike in NZ, the opportunity was not taken to haul passenger trains to the edge of electrification by these locomotives. An arrangement was used of hauling country passenger cars using motorised suburban cars, however this was not intended for the ‘major’ routes out of Melbourne, but mainly for the Lilydale and Frankston routes where the balance of the journey beyond the wires was short.
The Depression and the War saw the system work hard with little maintenance, and after the war the nature of the suburban passenger task began to change. Those lines that were really ‘interurban’ or ‘exurban’ in modern parlance (ie country) became genuinely suburban as the urban perimeter reached further along. The intensive inner Melbourne service that really was the primary justification for electrification (for example, to St Kilda) began to fade while those formerly interurban services became the main service.
This did not sway the case away from electrification, on the contrary, those longer lines saved the government a lot by not needing to be electrified anew, unlike the situation in Sydney where new outer suburbs like Penrith or Waterfall were requiring electrification.
Funds were scarce. Despite that what was previously interurban was now suburban and new places came into interurban range, like Werribee, Bacchus Marsh or Melton, no such ‘leap’ into new interurban or exurban places would take place in Melbourne, in the post war years, with only one exception – Gippsland, and the market town of Pakenham.
As in Sydney, this electrification was built for a coal haulage scheme, but unlike Sydney, where by 1970 3 lines had benefited, in Melbourne it was this sole line.
Unlike Sydney, where a fleet of interurban multiple unit trains was built to convey passengers beyond the suburban limit, this did not occur in Melbourne. Instead, an electric locomotive hauled conventional passenger carriages to Traralgon, the limit of electrification.
This decision alone had ramifications in that the idea of an interurban passenger train did not ‘sink in’ in Victoria while in NSW the same trains became part of a ‘constituency’ – as passengers and ultimately as voters, the market they served pressured government for a more and more useful form of this transport rather than simply running locomotive-hauled passenger trains as Victoria did.
This in turn also fed the desire to extend those wires even further, and when coal haulage to Port Kembla and intermodal goods haulage to Newcastle increased, a combined passenger and freight electrification project expanded the multiple units onto 3 long lines stretching north, west and south of Sydney.
By the 1980s the NSW Double Deck Interurban or V Set was the epitome of Australian rail travel, fast (up to 130kmh) quiet and comfortable, and extending (at least for a time) all the way to Kiama southwards, Lithgow in the west and Newcastle to the north. They retained he onboard toilets of the diesel trains they replaced. They are about to be replaced by Mariyung sets capable of 160kmh under the wires.
Meanwhile, the only concession to the Gippsland project, and very late in its life, was that existing Melbourne suburban trains were extended to Pakenham in 1975. At first the service was quite rudimentary with a shuttle service to Dandenong serving growing suburbs at Narre Warren and Berwick, and small hamlet beyond. This was followed by a couple of peak hour trains direct to Melbourne, and a full service 7 days a week only in the 1980s.
This service is unlikely to have been forthcoming had the line not been electrified based on coal haulage, and when that coal haulage faded away, the Pakenham service was the residue.
Melbourne had (arguably) six major routes out of town against Sydney having four, but making the case to electrify even the suburban sections of them was struggling.
Only the Pakenham line, of these, was electrified to what would be defined as the suburban edge in 1975. Werribee was the most pressing of these remaining, with the previous suburban edge at Newport some distance away.
Craigieburn, beyond Broadmeadows, was itself already a commuter town but poorly served by country rail. Demand was less pressing at Sunbury and Melton, though it was clear what was happening, and it was a marked contrast from the 1920s, when the line they joined at Sunshine was served, the existing limit at St Albans being a long way into the country side in those days.
The final one on the radar was Cranbourne, on the South Gippsland line. It was still not really a suburb in the 1970s, but the growth was clearly coming.
On less significant lines out of Frankston (to Baxter and Mornington) and to Healesville from Lilydale, whatever the merits of electrifying, the struggle would be to keep any rail presence, a struggle that was one day to be lost. Based on the same criteria as in the 1920s, those lines would have been electrified, but despite the suburban growth the rail ridership was falling as people in those places, unlike the 1920s, were far more likely to have access to a car.
Still the case for Werribee electrification was compelling from an operational point of view. The diesel-hauled and rail motor service was quite intense. See the picture below for an example from the last diesel train timetable in 1982. The blue section is the Werribee line and the express services would have originated in Geelong.
The Werribee line provided the opportunity to connect those communities into the newly opening City Loop, and saw an improvement in frequency. But in that respect, the last of the line extensions welcomed by the travelling public with absolutely open arms.
1982, as it happens, was also during the rollout of the New Deal for Country Rail Passengers (see this post on the topic). Where previously country rail services had been poorly equipped, with a mix of air-conditioned and non-airconditioned (generally timber-bodied) rolling stock and somewhat infrequent and slow, those aspects were being fixed with a program of rolling stock acquisition and upgrade including:
- new locomotive-hauled passenger carriages, all modern, quiet and air-conditioned with buffets and toilets
- refurbished Harris cars for loco-haulage, also air-conditioned, with full height fabric seats and on-board toilets
- refurbished diesel rail cars, also air-conditioned
And these purchases rapidly constituted the majority of the country fleet. Operationally under the New Deal, they were faster and moe frequent than prior to this period.
Alan Greenhill 
Meanwhile, on the suburban network, some new air-conditioned electric trains, the Comeng fleet, were starting to appear, however, they were much slower to have an impact on the fleet overall, and poor quality Tait and Harris trains tended to linger for many years, and the newer Hitachi non-airconditioned trains for decades after that.
Whereas prior to the New Deal, and especially upon the creation of the State Transport Authority (“Vline”) and Metropolitan Transit Authority (“Met”) as separate bodes, passengers in the border stations like Werribee, who had once had a choice of express “country” trains and slower “suburban” trains, they were now being forced into using suburban-only trains.
As we noted earlier, these were unlikely to be air-conditioned and generally had a much lower level of comfort, and would not at all have onboard facilities like buffet or toilet, were definitely going to be running slower and only had in their favour that they would be more frequent and would access the City Loop directly. And even the transport fares policy had some of these stations, had they been Vline only, a point to point fare might be cheaper than the multimodal fares of the same distance that Met passengers were forced to purchase.
Finally, Vline and the Met had a different attitude to the frequent 1980s transport strikes and disruptions, with Vline far more likely to put on direct and air-conditioned long distance coaches to replace their services, while the Met would struggle to provide an inferior service replacement if they provided one at all.
The suburban trains might have had an advantage in overall service quality, if the frequency was sufficiently better than the country trains. An observer might have thought that if, in the first electric timetable for Werribee, all the trains bar one an hour from Geelong were suburban trains, in other words, if you were to ‘turn up and go’ you wouldn’t wait around for the country train.
In Footscray that would be true, but outer suburban and interurban commuters are very likely to a) research the timetable to find the train they want and b) adjust some of their own personal journey plans to fit the preferred train and if that preferred train is a country train, you have literally wasted your billion dollars on electrification when the passengers didn’t want to catch any train, but rather a specific one.
Hence the need for coercive practices like preventing people boarding the country train, which alienate enthusiastic customers and are often unnecessary anyway if the space is available onboard.
Making the case for Werribee passengers to only ride suburban trains was not particularly difficult, but the clarity that existed then has gone now.
The new Tarneit line is as suburban now as Werribee was then, yet is Vline only using diesel trains, at high frequency, and is clearly a suburban service in all but name. The same applies to the Melton/Bacchus Marsh line.
Since the Werribee electrification there have been extensions to Cranbourne, Craigieburn and Sunbury. Cranbourne welcomed electrification because before the Leongatha closure it had only 2 trains each way a day, at not particularly convenient times. For a brief period in 1993 and 1994 it had no passenger trains at all and was in danger of full closure.
The cases for Cragieburn was less clear, as the Vline Seymour service was never very well used and it was only the opportunity to open a new station at Roxborough Park/Somerton that would serve new housing that really changed much. Since that electrification opened, the Vline Seymour service has also improved and that could have been used to manage the extra demand from Cragieburn itself.
By far the most egregious case is Sunbury, where residents lost the diesel only service that extended to Kyneton and Bendigo, and with the high level of existing demand, the coercive practices were most acutely felt and generated political pushback. Electrification was not at all welcomed, and with the improvements caused by the 2006 Regional Fast Rail program, services beyond Sunbury using diesel traction improved considerably as well, such that a few peak trains from Kyneton would have easily met the demand, while the off peak service did not need augmentation.
Which brings this blog back to Melton. This finds itself in a similar place to Sunbury, a population used to having a fast and frequent comfortable diesel service, who would lose all of the speed and comfort by moving to electric traction, and might only see some improvement in frequency, though this far into the suburbs it is probably not welcomed.
It is clear that just as Jesus offered to make Sons of Abraham out of rocks, Dan Andrews Labor Government can make good suburban rail services out of any form of traction, diesel or electric.
Victoria and Melbourne failed to go down the path of developing a purpose built Interurban train, electric, fast and comfortable, and chose to make electric rolling stock solely for the uncomfortable and slow but high frequency inner urban specification. This represents one limit on how the public perceive electric traction. The other is that diesel traction is now advancing into the place electric trains were once dominant, namely, for frequent suburban services while retaining their on-board comforts.
The result is the public cannot see any advantage to this form of traction let alone justifying the immense cost.
The future is even less clear for suburban electrification. For many years, it has been the desire to have a hybrid model, one where the heavier trafficked parts of a route were electric and the lesser traffic ends of these routes were not. The Kiama-Nowra line is a classic in this regard, with a diesel shuttle covering the last 3 stations of the line from Sydney.
New technology is making this possible, with 3 versions, a battery-electric (running on the current from the wire for the length of the wire, and then on batteries for the balance); an electro-diesel hybrid (again running on power from overhead wire where it exists, and diesel from onboard plant when it stops) and even hydrogen-powered variants, where these power sources may cost more the rolling stock but avoid the cost of overhead electrification.
In one sense it is ridiculous not to consider conventional electrification, and in most places such a project would deliver speed, frequency and comfort not available pre-wire. But in Victoria’s unique situation, where the goodwill electrification normally generates was squandered long ago, we may not see more.
Under The Clocks 
Yes I think I’d prefer the diesel service with only one intermediate stop at Footscray to the electric version too if I was in Sunbury and I could choose which train to take! As long as I had a seat!
I could see those in Melton and the suburban V/Line outputs on the RRL thinking the same thing. Until their trains were too packed and/or the Geelong commuters revolted! I imagine on that basis you’d never see electrification to Geelong either.
One wonders if both Melton and Wyndham Vale were electrified, and along with the Airport and Sunbury lines there were then four lines past Sunshine, which one would do the heavy lifting and service Tottenham, West Footscray and Middle Footscray – would it continue to be the Sunbury line? Certainly wouldn’t sell electrification if Melton and Wyndham Vale had to stop at those intermediate stations!
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Thanks Steve, I just don’t think the ‘contrast’ between suburban and interurban services is so sharp in Sydney, and we put passengers in places like Melton and Sunbury in the impossible situation of wanting a service they can’t have.
Wyndham Vale was originally supposed to be a branchline from Werribee and electrified so that passengers would not be on the Vline. I really think the locals would be out with pitchforks if they try that now!
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