Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Classic V/Line

I've been letting a few things slide in my first few weeks back, warming up to a really good whinge. The three months of cartharsis takes a really good stuff-up to break through and get the fingers tingling to write up a blog entry.

However the effort this morning for the 6.44am from Geelong was abysmal. The alleged reason was 'technical difficulties with the locomotive' however I suspect perhaps someone was late for work to drive a train! (pure speculation, but the loco was quite happily driven up to and attached to the carriages wasn't it??)

Anyway, so the 6.44am was actually the 7.06am or thereabouts .... sometimes these things cannot be helped I know, particularly when V/Line has all these NEW extra trains, that could perhaps alleviate the obvious stress and lack of time to properly maintain the existing fleet. Call me a cynic!

Luckily my training was at 9.00am rather than 8.30am, so it didn't matter that I was over 30 minutes late thanks to V/line by the time I actually walked in the door.

I didn't bother to rush for the 5.13pm tonight, as the record for that Very Fast Train hasn't been good when I have been catching it. Nor really for the 5.29pm, which is stuck over all the way on Platform 14 these days. I have heard that the 4.40pm has been running fairly smoothly these days, but unfortunately my care-free 7.5 hour work days that allowed me to catch that service are no more, so I have to persevere with the later services.

The only other thing to note is some of the older carriages are now sporting automatic doors rather than being manual handle openers. I suppose this is to prevent the really stupid people who obviously open doors and fall out on the wrong side of platforms that we hear about on all the announcements about exiting the train!

Too bad they couldn't spend a bit more money and fix up the heating/air-con at the same time.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Glad I'm not the only one extremely dissapointed with the service

I tried getting the train from Ballarat to Melbourne for a week a while ago and was so dissapointed with faults, delays and confusion at Southern Cross that I haven't tried it again for 6 months.
1 day after getting on my 5:00 Met train at Sandringham it took me 4 hours to get back to Ballarat

I tried it again this week and was a bit better, but the 5:03 from North Melb was never on time once.

Other whinges due to high expectations from a project costing this much:
- Train was delayed by driving not being able to see out of windscreen (Hit dirt or cow dung or something, but it made a mess).
Surely the train should have high powered wipers/washers to account for hitting objects

-Trains dont have curtains or tinted windows WHY? Sunglare -- Cant work/read

- That bloody brake noice is incredibly annoying. Sounds like a sound effect out of a 50's sci fi movie. (Maybe the older guys who designed it couldn't here it, its pretty high frequency)

- Wheres my laptop powerpoint and wifi connection?

13/8/06 11:02 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh I forgot- another whinge when I first tried their service was that the return journey thing didn't work in Firefox.

To their credit they actually fixed that after a complaint.

13/8/06 11:10 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

has anyone noticed that they are making announcements and calling Passengers Customers now. like we have a choice i'm a passenger not a customer , if i was i'd go elsewhere.

14/8/06 10:52 pm  
Blogger vlinewhinger said...

laptop? Wi-fi ... the new trains can't even manage decent leg room or tables or recline like 1st class seats!

I agree about the curtains/blinds. I think I mentioned that in a blog entry once. the other thing is the inability of the conductor to move between carriages easily.

15/8/06 2:43 pm  
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29/1/15 5:18 pm  

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