By reconfiguring the City Loop in the manner that was pictured, wouldn’t people on the newly created Burnley Direct simply change onto the Caulfield/Northern groups at North Melbourne or Richmond? – resulting in congestion at City Loop stations once again? Another commenter also highlighted that the diagram may not depict actual passenger activity which is a similar issue. We could end up with viaduct trains being empty, and the City Loop congested once again because people simply prefer going to Flagstaff, Melbourne Central, and Parliament rather than Flinders St or Southern Cross. Not everyone wants to take a direct train from Camberwell to Craigieburn for example – many want to go to the city.

No more inconvenient than the current arrangement is for any passenger wanting to do the reverse of your suggestion. You can never have a train split into two directions at once. And the solution is the same as current for all those passengers: change at North Melbourne or at Richmond for an appropriate train going the direction you want. At the moment, I come into the city on the Glen Waverley Line (which all run direct to Flinders) so I have to change at Richmond for a train which runs through the City Loop. The change is exactly as inconvenient, just for a different group of people; yet improves the capacity of the overall system and also reduces the inconvenience of anyone wanting to take cross-city travel.

Half of the Frankston passengers getting off at Parliament? Half of the Craigieburn passengers getting off at Flagstaff?

This is actually *exactly* the same flawed thinking that gave us the City Loop in the first place.

The thinking starts from “we have an operational problem, how do we fix it?” and proceeds from there.

In the case of the city loop, the operational problem was that demand was inbalanced between the east/south and north/west (making through running inefficient), and that the major between peak sidings were at Flinders St (limitting capacity due to the necessary shunting movements). The result was the concept of four uni-directional tunnels feeding directly into the stabling sidings, with a midday change of direction.

The operational problems driving these proposals are clear from the extracts you’ve included.

But note the absence of any consideration of where passengers are trying to get to, where they’ll need to change in order to do so, and what will need to be built or services that will need to be provided to make these changes work for the passengers.