Bacchus Marsh is a warm friendly and rapidly growing country town midway between Melbourne and Ballarat.  A large percentage of the town's workers and a significant number of children use the train service to travel to work or school to both Melbourne and Ballarat. Thus the V/Line peak hour service, in both directions, plays a major role in providing access to work and schools for residents of Bacchus Marsh. 

Please sign this petition. It is not only the people of Bacchus Marsh that are being disadvantaged. Anyone travelling on the Ballarat line in the overcrowded trains are.  Furthermore if V/Line gets away with reducing the quality of service on this line, who knows how many other lines may follow suit.

If you value quality public transport, now is the time to take a stand and sign this petition.  Let V/Line know that the people of Victoria value and deserve quality public transport. 

With the recent Time Table change advertised as 'More Trains, More Often' the peak hour service to Bacchus Marsh has declined significantly. Despite more trains scheduled on the Ballarat line the peak hour service has been degraded significantly.  Four key areas of reduced service are:

1) Peak Hours service from Melbourne to Bacchus Marsh between 4 and 5pm.   Now we have two services with a 2-minute break 4:02 /4:04 then nothing until 4:54. This means a 50-minute break between trains in peak hour!  Immediately prior we had a train at 4:01, 4:14, and 4:45.   Providing no more than 30 minutes between services.  This is a significant reduction in quality of service by almost doubling times between services in the critical peak hours.

Importantly this issue can easily be resolved by having the 4:33 train stop at Bacchus Marsh, or the 4:35 service extended from Melton to Bacchus Marsh.

2)  A 70-minute break between services to Ballarat from Bacchus Marsh in morning peak hour is problematic for school children and workers. It can be seen that 6:12, 7:12 and 8:04 from Melbourne to Ballarat has been changed to 6:13, 7:26 and 8:17.  The wonderful thing is the 6:13 manages to travel to Ballarat 20 minutes quicker.  However it means it departs Bacchus Marsh 10 minutes earlier, at 7:10, and arrives in Ballarat at 7:41.  Yet the next train, the 7:26 from Melbourne, departs Bacchus Marsh at 8:27 arriving in Ballarat at 9:13, is clearly going to be too late for school children and workers.  Timing on the return trip may also be improved. 

It is not going to be quite so easy to correct this problem, however it does need to be addressed in order to provide a useful service to travellers. Especially if you wish to up hold the “More Trains, More Often’ claim.  One option for addressing the issue, considering the number of travellers, is scheduling a train that travels from Bacchus Marsh to Ballarat arriving around 8:10 would be fantastic!

3)  The failure to provide trains that stop at Sunshine and Bacchus Marsh in the afternoon peak times.  Not one train stops at both Sunshine and Bacchus Marsh between the 16:04 and 17:19.  This means a 75 minute without service in peak hour.  Clearly consideration has not been given to people that work in Sunshine and live in Bacchus Marsh.  

Once again this can be corrected simply but returning Sunshine as a stop for some of the trains. 

4) The reduction of carriages and change of times has resulted in less available seats and over crowding on many peak hour services.  The resulting standing room only has created safety issues, including difficulty boarding and departing the train, crowding around 'elderly travelling in wheel chairs', inability to access toilets, very difficult for the young children travelling on the train.  Please return the services to safe standard immediately.

Please sign this petition.  It is not only the people of Bacchus Marsh that are being disadvantaged.  Anyone travelling on the line in the overcrowded trains are.  Furthermore if V/Line gets away with this reduction of service on one line who knows how many other lines may follow suit in the future.   If you value quality public transport now is the time to take a stand and sign this petition.  

Please note there are somethings that V/Line do well.  My favourite is the quality staff,  95-98% of the time V/Line staff are friendly, helpful and do a wonderful job.  Congratulations to the staff for providing such a great service and to V/Line for providing them.  It is deeply appreciated. 

It is also wonderful that there has been an increase in trains (though some people request even more, admittedly I agree).  The other is that some trains seem to be travelling quicker.  Great work!  At the same time it is hard to deny that reliability is still an issue. 

So I'd like to make it clear this petition is focused on the Four key issues that have arisen due to the time table change that started on the 21st of June 2015. 

It is asked that the Peak Hour Service be corrected immediately!