An election promise to build two new rail lines in Melbourne’s outer west has been axed, with the Victorian government instead considering whether to electrify existing lines.
from Geelong and Ballarat. Duplicating the tracks would unblock a bottleneck at Sunshine and free up capacity for faster and more frequent regional and suburban trains.has obtained through a freedom-of-information request reveal Rail Projects Victoria has cut the new tracks from the Western Rail Plan. Instead, plans the agency created in February this year show metropolitan trains will operate on the existing Regional Rail Link track also used by regional trains.
An Andrews government spokesman said the RPV plan was an internal working document and the agency had not decided about electrifying the existing RRL tracks. But the original promise to build new rail lines and separate suburban and regional trains is off the table, unless RPV’s plans change again. The city’s best served train lines, including Frankston and Pakenham, operate a service almost every 10 minutes at peak times and some stations served by multiple lines, such as Caulfield, have trains departing every few minutes.– says new nine-carriage Metro trains with capacity for 2000 passengers will serve the western suburbs stations, significantly larger than the 440-seat six-carriage V/Line trains currently used.
When it announced the Western Rail Plan in 2018, the Andrews government said that duplicating and electrifying the lines was necessary to address “unprecedented population and patronage growth in the outer western suburbs” that was already causing overcrowding.
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