Airport Line Service Changes - Trains
Inner Stations (Claremont - Perth - Bayswater)
Starting with the (very) good news here: as expected, the inner core of the Fremantle and Midland lines will run every 6 to 8 minutes during the day and into the early evening, seven days per week. Night services will also be doubled to run every 15 minutes through to midnight, and every half hour until 1:30am on Friday and Saturday nights. Interestingly, there are a few early-morning short services from Perth to Claremont and evening trains from Claremont to Perth that are shown only on the Fremantle Line timetable, though in reality these would be Airport Line trains either starting or finishing service for the day. The one relatively weak spot remains operating hours, with the most significant improvement being that Sunday trains will start 20 minutes earlier from Claremont (but not Fremantle) to Perth. There'll be more on this later, but first there's the ugly matter of what's happened on the outer half of each line.
Outer Stations (Fremantle, Midland and Airport Lines)
Here we find the worst part of these changes - the reduction of peak frequency from every 10 minutes to every 12 minutes in the Claremont-Fremantle and Bayswater-Midland sections. Now this change does have its justifications - for one it'll be required in a couple of years to allow the Ellenbrook line to run through to Perth, much as I have my concerns about that particular project. In the meantime it'll also reduce the peak driver requirement (particularly useful at times like this), allow every Fremantle/Midland train to run as 4 cars and release a couple more 'operational spare' B series sets since the A series isn't exactly getting any younger. But at the same time, the reduced frequency is not only being less convenient in isolation (with longer wait times and a timetable that's harder to memorise) but it also makes for less consistent connections with the rest of the network, typically operating at frequencies of 10, 15, 20 or occasionally 30 minutes. It also leads to the awkward 24-minute frequency of some of the new feeder routes, which fails to meet the 20-minute Acceptable Service Level benchmark and breaks from Transperth's preference for clockface frequencies, making it even harder to memorise than the 12-minute train timetable - and this could well get even worse once the Ellenbrook line opens. I only hope the new signalling system comes sooner rather than later on this line so that the 10 minute frequency can be restored.
Fortunately though, the planners seem to have done a reasonable job working within the constraints imposed by the reduced frequency. For one thing, while both the Fremantle and Midland lines will see a reduction in service compared to the current (2019) timetables, which added a fair number of mostly inbound trips, there will in fact still be slightly more weekday trains on each line compared to when the Airport Line contracts were signed back in 2016. This has been achieved by broadening the morning and afternoon peaks, as well as pushing the half-hourly night frequency later and later with every timetable change:
As for the existing Midland and Fremantle line feeder buses, it is perhaps fortunate that many routes are either so infrequent that the reduced train frequency has only a minimal impact, or that the peak times are so narrow (often less than an hour) that the entire notion of a clockface frequency is more or less irrelevant during the peak period. A backhanded compliment for sure - but I'd be much more scathing if this reduction was applied to the Joondalup and Mandurah lines. For those routes that currently run to reasonable frequencies, a number of different approaches have been taken to adjust to the new train timetable - which in most cases have maintained the same number of trips:
- 102: This route will run as close as it can to a 20 minute frequency, resulting in a mildly uneven (18-18-24) but still clockface timetable. As flagged by the Transperth website, two afternoon peak trips will be withdrawn - but this seems linked to low demand since the train frequency at Claremont station is actually increasing.
- 107: As with the 102 this route will run to a slightly uneven but still clockface timetable in the morning. Afternoon trips will continue to run every half hour, which continues to mesh neatly with the 6 minute train frequency.
- 300: This privately-funded shuttle continues to completely disregard the train timetable and run every 20 minutes (the duration of a full circuit plus some padding), both peak and off-peak
- 301: Peak frequency will be reduced from 10 to 12 minutes, with a small reduction in total trips
- 320: In the morning this route will now run every 12 minutes for a 36-minute period at the height of the peak, with 24-minute shoulders either side, compared to the current timetable of every 20 minutes with a single "intermediate" trip on top of this. The afternoon frequency will be reduced from every 20 minutes to every 24 minutes, but this will operate later into the evening (particularly when taken in combination with route 328).
- 322: Afternoon peak frequency will be reduced from every 20 minutes to every 24 minutes, but the 40 minute gap between the 4:51pm and 5:31pm trips will be filled in
- 341-342: This route combination will be improved from an uneven 10-20 minute pattern to a 12 minute frequency, although both morning and afternoon peaks have a single strange 24-minute gap that hopefully will be fixed sooner rather than later.
- 353: Frequency has been increased from every 20 to every 12 minutes - since this route has seen more substantial changes than most, there'll be more in the next (and hopefully last) post.
- 548: Peak frequency will be reduced from 20 to 24 minutes, but this will operate for a wider span of hours (during which the route currently drops to half hourly). This route will also lose one trip each direction, but the trip to Fremantle is unrelated to the train changes.
- 549: Morning peak frequency will be reduced from every 10-20 minutes to every 12-24 minutes, but will start earlier and finish later. Afternoon peak frequency will be reduced from 20 to 24 minutes, with the loss of two trips to Rockingham.
- 955: Peak frequency will be reduced from 10 to 12 minutes, with the savings reinvested to upgrade the contra-peak frequency from every 20 minutes to every 12 minutes and push the 15 minute frequency (to Ellenbrook) half an hour later into the evening. The overall number of weekday trips remains the same between Bassendean and Ellenbrook. As with the 353 there'll be more on this route in the next post.
Operating Hours
Well this part has certainly been contentious, since the Airport Line will not cater for the majority of FIFO workers who depart early in the morning. I consider this a reasonable compromise based on the available evidence: while there are (by my count) around 50 domestic flights leaving before 7am, making for up to 9,000 people (assuming each is a fully-loaded 737/A320), the estimate in the
Perth Airport Masterplan is that the Airport Line will have a mode share of only 4% in 2025. Even if we adjust it slightly higher to 5% (to compensate for the train only being an option for 85% of flights), this works out at only 450 potential train passengers - or 225 passengers per hour. This would also be based on then entire supporting train network starting two to three hours earlier as well, all for maybe 50 passengers per hour per line - which would have to be split over at least two trains per hour so that the service isn't unusably tokenistic. While I wouldn't be surprised to see the 4% figure turn out to be quite an underestimate given the $5 train fare is an absolute bargain compared to every other option, I'm less optimistic about the prospects for passenger numbers early in the morning when the roads are empty and convenience is more of a deciding factor (or at least it would be to me). And this is without even considering the oft-cited problem of track maintenance. I wouldn't necessarily be against a FIFO-targeted service if the line turns out to be a roaring success (and I certainly hope it is), but otherwise I'd much rather see the money spent on reintroducing the off-peak Whitfords/Cockburn shuttle, or further expanding and improving the high frequency bus network, or bringing weekend frequencies network-wide to the same level as weekday interpeak, or rolling out new cross-town routes and services to developing areas.
The Airport Line's operating hours do, however, fall short when compared to the current train network. For example, the first weekday train doesn't arrive at Perth Station until 06:04 - 20 minutes later than most other lines (which arrive between 05:40 and 05:47), and over half an hour later than the Joondalup line (at 05:28). Weekends are similarly affected, with the first Saturday train from High Wycombe arriving at 06:42 (compared to 05:55 on the Armadale, Joondalup and Mandurah lines) and the first Sunday train arriving at 08:04, compared to the Thornlie, Joondalup and Mandurah lines and the majority of high frequency bus routes all having services that arrive in Perth by 07:30. Even the first train from Claremont, on the other half of the Airport Line, arrives only a few minutes later at 07:35. When it comes to improving operating hours, I'd say fixing this would be a pretty good place to start. While I'm unfamiliar with the specifics of railway timetabling, I wonder if this could involve outbound trips to the airport starting half an hour earlier as well - since it seems (via the Railcar Allocation calculator) that there are indeed trains leaving Perth that early, albeit running dead to get in position for the inbound service to start.
Armadale, Joondalup, Mandurah and Thornlie Lines
Timetables have been reissued for these lines but the only changes I could find were the addition of the Airport Line to the Perth Station map at the back along with the new stopping pattern diagram style. I will question why the new diagrams do absolutely nothing to indicate train interchanges - surely it would be worth it, to take the Airport Line as an example, to have connection markers at Bayswater (for the Midland Line), East Perth (Transwa), Claisebrook (Armadale/Thornlie), Perth (Joondalup/Mandurah) and Claremont (Fremantle)? We're no longer in the days of the CBD being the only connection point after all - doubly so when the Thornlie-Cockburn and Ellenbrook lines open.
Transwa
This is something that I spotted on the timetables at
railmaps.com.au - the majority of Prospector and MerredinLink trains from East Perth will now depart five minutes earlier to resume the current timetable from Midland onwards, presumably due to track congestion as far as Bayswater. There appears to be no such allowance in the opposite direction though.
To be concluded......