Community
8 April, 2026
All aboard: Town bands together to bring passenger trains back through St Arnaud
“It shouldn’t be a struggle in this day and age.”
ST Arnaud feels cut off from major centres across Victoria.
And residents say they won’t give up until their voices are heard - to have a passenger train through town once again.
A large group of community members came out in force on Good Friday in order to make a statement.
Some remembered what it was like before trains were taken off the Mildura to Maryborough line in 1993.
“I remember travelling from Mildura and going through St Arnaud, it was a long trip, but a beautiful one that worked,” Carapooee resident Barbra Robertson said.
Linda O’Donnell, who works in disability support in St Arnaud, it was affecting a majority of her clients.
“I send a lot of families affected by mental health concerns or that are elderly to specialists in Melbourne and they struggle to get there,” she said.
“It shouldn’t be a struggle in this day and age.”
Rail Revival Alliance Victoria Inc. president Noel Laidlaw has been working with many townships along the Mildura train line, including St Arnaud, Donald and Birchip, to lobby for the reinstatement of the passanger trains along that route.
He said plenty of work had been done on the infrastructure already.
“Nearly a billion dollars has been spent on the Mildura rail line over the past 10 years and this has only been to the benefit of the freight industry,” he said. “The line to Mildura is now in excellent condition with rail welding, new ballast and concrete sleepers.
“It says so much that a tourist operator can run a train to Mildura two or three times per year but VLine seems incapable of doing the same.”
Mr Laidlaw has done the maths and has come up with a number of proposals that could work for communities along the line.
“There are numerous opportunities,” he said.
“We could include stops in places like Lascells to connect with the significant tourism business that has seen thousands of Chinese tourists coming to Sea Lake, for example.
“There will be many such opportunities such as this to develop and enhance the tourist industries following the COVID-19 pandemic, which has done so much damage to many small regional communities and economies.”
He had even done the sums on what it would cost.
“The Parliamentary Budget Office provided an estimate of the costs associated with the introduction of this proposal in 2022 and they suggested it would be less than $30M to get this service into operation,” Mr Laidlaw said.
“This is a drop in the barrell of the money that is currently being spent by the Department of Transport on mainly Melbourne based projects.”
Outgoing Liberal MP for Western Victoria Joe McCracken raised the town’s plight in parliament last week, saying the town was struggling to get anywhere with unreliable public transport currently in place.
“Bus services are critical at the moment,” he said.
“I’ve had locals tell me that if they have to take a bus to either Ballarat or Bendigo, the timetable allows them to get there in one day, but there are no return services. So they effectively have to stay overnight, which is insane.
“My question is to the Minister [for Transport], will you look into this situation and will you do anything about it?
“They’re in a situation they should never have been in during a fuel crisis, where people are looking to public transport as opposed to putting petrol in their cars.”
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