If you regularly travel to and from regional Victoria by train, then you're probably aware that V/Line trains sometimes have some issues. From train faults causing delays to crowded carriages, the experience of venturing out to the regions can be made pretty unpleasant when things go off the rails. It's no wonder that the fare prices decreased last year.
Luckily, there are changes in the works to fix these problems. The state government has announced that a fleet of freshly-built trains will be rolled out this year, in order to support the increasing demand for regional rail travel.
We can expect 23 shiny new VLocity trains to hit the tracks, with an eye-watering price tag of $601 million. That'll bring it to a total of 141 trains of the latest model, and hopefully, they'll all run smoothly. The VLocity trains are the fastest yet, with a top speed of 166 km/h.
The new additions mean that the old Classic Fleet trains can finally be phased out – and it's definitely time. These trains were a refurbished model from the 1980s, built out of carriages originally made in the 1950s. So they're due for their retirement.
The Bacchus Marsh and Geelong routes will gain the new locomotives, to help improve reliability and capacity issues. But the entire VLocity fleet runs across the entire V/Line work, to Albury, Ararat, Bairnsdale, Ballarat, Echuca, Geelong, Maryborough, Seymour, Shepparton and Traralgon.
This is all part of the government's grand plan to add a whopping 200 more additional V/Line train services on weekends, a project costing another $219 million.
You can read more about the new trains here.
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