Personally I’m not a huge fan of them in their current use case, however I think little diesel rail cars like it would be very useful as shuttle services in places who’ve lost their passenger service due to lack of patronage, or just don’t have a very good one.
There’s a few ideas that come to mind as better use cases them going to and from Seymour all day:
- They could run shuttles between Ballarat-Geelong
-They could run shuttles on the outer edges of the network which currently have quite poor service (Ballarat-Maryborough, Traralgon-Bairnsdale, Bendigo-Echuca, etc)
- Some could be gauge converted and run Ararat-Horsham shuttles, or Ararat-Portland
I really think single DRCs still have a place in 2024. Vlocities can be nice, but 3 car set shuttles do seem a bit overkill for some of the above services. I don’t think there’s many people who’d rather have no service/a crappy coach over a single car sprinter shuttle to the nearest station
I think the biggest cost is the driver, and that doesn’t change however long the train is, so it’s probably not that more expensive to run vlocs
i really like how they look though
I had a look through the 2022-23 annual report and if I’m interpreting it right (high chance I’m not), the highest relevant costs are indeed staffing, but that’s followed quite closely by vehicle maintenance / repairs. There’s obviously not much that can be done about staff costs, but smaller trains = less maintenance, less surface area than can be graffitied/vandalised, etc. Vlines fuel costs aren’t as high as I was expecting, although if a new generation of sprinters was ordered I imagine they’d have more efficient engines and be at about the same fuel efficiency as vlocities (my assumption is they’d do worse at the moment due to having an engine for every car and being older)
But really anything is doable if the political will is there
(Edit: this entire comment is just an assumption, to be clear. I don’t think there’s any more specific info out there, so the only thing I could think of was seeing whether or not fleet costs outweigh staffing costs annually or not, and they currently don’t, but some staff included in the annual costs wouldn’t be relevant to a shuttle service so that’d being the actual cost down a bit too. My final assumption is that staff costs and fleet costs work out about the same annually)
I guess you could count a single sprinter unit as like a slightly better bus.
It’d be neat if you could take these trains around regional Victoria orbitally
The front looks like it’s smiling
Yes. They’re colloquially known as “smiley sprinters”. It used to just be 1 (or perhaps it was 2?) with the rest painted into the standard grey and red livery, but more seem to have been painted into PTV recently.
Some R&G liveries are still around, although I don’t know the exact numbers, I have seen more smiley than non smiley sprinters recently. Though that could just be caused by only a few sets running most services
Unfortunately my phone decided to not focus, and then when it tried to fix it it just made it worse, but you can get the general idea in this pic:
